From the Club 100 support files (www.club100.org)...

COLD RESTART RECOVERY by TRACY ALLEN

Cold start!  All your work disappears from your menu and the date reverts to 
01/01/00!  Don't panic.  You may still be able to recover your text documents. 
Do _not_  start on a new text document!   Immediately enter BASIC and type in 
the following short program: 

      OPEN "IT" FOR OUTPUT AS 1
      FOR X=????? TO HIMEM : PRINT#1,CHR$(PEEK(X)); : NEXT

You should type this in without line numbers.  Type in the first line, from 
OPEN through 1, then press ENTER.  Then type in the second line all the way 
from the FOR through the NEXT, then press ENTER.  Substitute the appropriate 
value for the amount of memory you have in place of the ?????.  For a 32K 
M100/102 use ?????=32768.  For a 24K M100/102 use ?????=40960.  And for a T200 
(in the 24K bank that is cold started!) use ?????=40960.  Be very careful also 
to put in the colons, semicolons and parentheses where called for. 

After you hit ENTER, the recovery process takes __five minutes__, during which 
nothing seems to be happening.  Wait it out.  When the OK prompt reappears, 
tap F8 to return to the menu, and you will see the one document file "IT.DO". 
You can now edit "IT.DO" using TEXT.  There will be junk at the beginning and 
at the end.  The junk at the beginning is the remains of your BASIC programs 
(if any).  You may recognize a lot of the stuff that identifies them, like 
prompts or DATA statements they contain.  Sorry, it is generally impossible to 
recover BASIC programs.  You use the F7 key and the cursor keys to select the 
junk at the beginning of the file, up to the recognizable start of your 
documents, and then press F6 to delete it.  Now, move to the end of your 
recognizable text.  What comes after is the remnants of your machine language 
programs (if any) and assorted other unrecoverable gibberish.   Use F7 and the 
cursor keys to select that stuff, and then use F6 to eliminate it.  Then copy 
one character from the text (F7--select any character--F5), to clear out the 
paste buffer.  Now go back to the menu (F8).  You should see IT.DO  reduced in 
size and the FREE MEMORY increased in size  (depending on how many documents 
vs programs and free memory you had before the cold start).   Now you can go 
into TEXT again and either save the whole mess of documents onto a printer or 
tape or what have you, and/or you can cut and paste to chop the long document 
up into its proper pieces. 

Keep a copy of the above program taped to the bottom of your computer, just in 
case! 

The original version of this program was contributed by the late Bill 
Templeton.  This write-up by Tracy Allen is a Club 100 research project. 

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