OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

'He sat in a chair, rubbed his temple, and began to recite syntax as if performing magic'

On Call The end of the working week brings with it magical possibilities for fun and frolics, which is why The Register celebrates each Friday with a fresh incantation of On Call – the reader-contributed column that tells your tech support tales.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rohan" who told us of an incident from the late 1990s when a friend operated a bulletin board on a machine that ran IBM's OS/2 Warp operating system.

That box was crashing constantly, so Rohan's friend asked if he could fix it.

Rohan visited his friend's home and sat down in front of the OS/2 box. He watched it boot, load several programs, then crash. Then boot, then load programs, then crash.

The cycle looked like it would repeat until the heat death of the universe.

Rohan quickly figured out why. "The default behavior for OS/2 was to reboot and then restart any programs that were running at the time of the reboot/crash," he told On Call. So the BBS box was behaving as intended, and Rohan could not figure out how to fix it.

But he knew a bloke – let's call him Jim – who was an OS/2 guru and willing to help.

"After seeing the boot loop, Jim sat in a chair and thought about it," Rohan recalled.

"And then – and I will never forget this – he sat in the chair, put his head in his hands, began to rub his temples as if summoning a higher power of OS/2 knowledge, and slowly began to speak."

In that strange techno-trance, Jim uttered the following:

"In your CONFIG.SYS file put the line RESTARTOBJECT, RESTARTOBJECTS, plural, equal, STARTUPFOLDER, STARTUPFOLDERSONLY."

Rohan did as he was told, saved the CONFIG.SYS file, and rebooted the OS/2 box.

"Like magic, the evil boot loop was broken, the system was usable, and we were able to correct the issue causing the crash and boot loop," Rohan wrote. And when Rohan returned home that night, he immediately modified the CONFIG.SYS on his system to avoid a similar doom loop. "I did not pass go nor collect $200. I modified my CONFIG.SYS," Rohan told On Call.

"To watch a man sit in a chair, rub his temples, and slowly emit the words as he did was like watching witchcraft," Rohan told On Call. "It was unforgettable."

Have you seen a techie in a trance? Or a sysadmin cast a spell? Share your magical tale by clicking here to send On Call an email so we can consider your mysterious message for a future Friday. ®