An old roommate's computer was having, shall we say, some weirdness. It would crash periodically, flashing a blue screen for half a second as the only indication of what the problem was.

So eventually, I figured I'd run the system restore discs for her. Except, when I tried to run them, I got the error "Wrong Machine".

After a google search, I found that this error is not uncommon for Toshiba laptops, whether the same model ( Satellite 1805 ) or not. The only known solution was to go to the tech support center and have them run a utility to change what your computer identifies itself as.

But after poking around through the DOS batch files that start up the system restore, I realized that, oh if only I could change this CD, just a few characters, I'd be able to circumvent the machine check. After all, I knew it was the right machine -- why not??

So I extracted an ISO of the "Recovery and Configuration Builder CD - Satellite 1805 series - Disc 1 of 3" cd. My first attempt was to copy that to a folder on my desktop so I could edit /bin/recover.bat in vim.

After a brief lecture about the "El Torito" booting system, and about 20 minutes consulting man pages for mkisofs, I hit an error I didn't know how to handle: The boot floppy image was the wrong size, by a few bytes.

Well, first you try things the right way, then you try things the way that works.

I then proceeded to install 'hexcurse', a command line hex editor. Opening up the 650-meg ISO (and it's times like these that I'm glad I have a gig of memory) and letting it search for the command I wanted to comment out took more than a few minutes. It found it at the offset 1391833D within the file, and I then overwrote the first few charcters of the "if errorlevel 1 goto BadMach" command to instead read "@rem rorlevel1 goto BadMach" so that DOS would interpret it as a comment rather than a command. I then burned the ISO, and all was right with the world.

Now lets see if this actually fixes the poor machine.