Well, after today I get the feeling that POS should stand for the more common phrase and not Point of Sale, but that’s beyond the point.
Okay, condensed story of my work day. I was asked by my boss if I could figure out how to retrieve the SKUs he lost months ago. After doing a HDD scan that was negative for bad sectors (hey, always check those things first on an old computer, right?), we decided that we’d have to try and restore the SKUs using an older backup. I went back to a file that was fairly well before he erased all those SKUs and used the CDB to restore the system back to that point. This got us back the missing SKUs but also reset the books back nearly two years. I then reset with the backup from the previous day, which fixed the books and also kept the imported SKUs from the earlier backup.
So far so good. However, we were (and are) having trouble getting the computer in the back (it’s an old 386, IBM-built, running Win 3.1 and I’m not sure what version of DOS) to talk properly to the register. See, in theory, you can update the SKUs on that computer and then send the data to both the CDB and the registers. However, whenever we try to update, we get an error message that the device memory (read: register) is full, which suggests to me that instead of overwriting, the software is attempting to add in the SKUs.
Now, this wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that the old SKU data has the wrong prices on almost everything we sell. While that is fixable from the register, it is a pain. However, that is what we’re doing right now.
I did suggest to my boss that the last-ditch possibility was to blow away that part of the register’s memory and try doing a new export from the CDB. Problem is, I can’t guarantee that it’ll work and that everything will work perfectly again after we do that.
Does anyone have any idea how we can fix this without resorting to scorched earth measures? Also, please note, I did all of this without any sort of documentation, so I still feel that I did the best I could.