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How to transfer data from an ancient computer???

G

ganesha

Senior member
I haven't seen it yet, but my boss wants to see if I can get some files off of an old PC for a grad student tomorrow. All I know is it only has a 5 1/4 floppy and a 20 meg hard drive. It's either MFM or RLL. Laplink was used but of no success(I don't know the details) Is there any way to put this hard drive in a new machine and be recognized?
Any suggestions would be appreciated🙂
 
If the H/D has 40 Pin IDE connection I would think you could just set it up as the slave and copy the files over to the master drive.
 
Just buy a 5 1/4 drive, put the files on disk, then to your computer.
 
I believe these drives may plug into a card which then plug into an ISA slot, but I'm not sure.
We have just pulled a ton of 386 and 486's with 5 1/4 drives so I may do just that. Thanks for the replys.
 
Whatever it is, it's got to have a serial or parallel port, so Laplink DOS ought to work. And I have a 20M drive from a 286 that is just as died-in-the-wool IDE as anything out today.

Worse comes to worst, less than sixteen 5-1/4" floppies will hold the entire contents of the drive in a ZIP archive spanning multiple disks. Then just plug the 5-1/4" drive into the other PC and use it to dump everything in.

If you end up doing it the floppy route, make him buy you lunch 😉

Modus
 
Bet ya got a Seagate ST225 hard-drive. They were as common a ticks on a hound back in the old days. Its an MFM drive and will not work on an IDE controller. You need to find a compatable controller card, or you could try installing the contrller and drive from this machine into a more modern system. You will probably have to disable the first IDE contoller on the modern system as the old controller probably will not run as secondary.
 
hmm, maybe the files arnt the whole drive, so if ya can get a modern sys with a 5.25 just find a 5.25 and go that way, if the ancient sys is still bootable that is
 
hmm... the ISA slot is an I/O card I guess.
In the olden day, the motherboard didn't have onboard IDE controller.
just take out the hard drive and stick it to ur new mobos.
 
*Update*

For you PC historians, it was a Commodore Colt running Dos 3.20. It was loaded with Norton Utilities from 1988, as well as an old version of Quicken, Wordperfect and PFC. It actually had two 5 1/4 drives. We did manage to start transfering the data via Laplink for dos. The hard part was finding a low density 5 1/4 disk that the Commodore could read and format to put Laplink on. Half way through the transfer it crapped out for some reason. We'll try again on monday with a parallel port cable that we found since we were only using a serial.
Thanks for all the replies.

Here are the specs I found for the morbidly curious😛

KEY FEATURES
Here's a summary of the major features of the Commodore Colt:
- 8088-1 microprocessor; 4.77 and 7.16 MHz clock speeds
- 640 KB internal RAM
- PC-XT compatible BIOS
- AUTOCONFIG - automatically recognizes and
accommodates expansion cards
- Built-in video controller chip - provides versatile
monochrome/color display capabilities, compatible with
MDA, CGA, Hercules and Plantronics displays.
- Two 5 1/4 inch 360 KB floppy disk drives
- Hard disk interface on motherboard - when used with an
XT-type hard disk, eliminates the need for a separate hard
disk controller in one of the expansion slots
- 3 full-size PC-XT internal expansion slots
- Socket for optional 8087 math co-processor
- Battery-powered clock/calendar
- Microsoft compatible mouse port (optional Commodore 1352 mouse)
- RS-232 serial port
- Centronics parallel port
- 84-key ASCII keyboard with full PC-XT compatibility
- High-efficiency power supply with fan - supports up to 2
floppy drives, a hard drive, and 3 expansion cards
 
Since you were scrounging for a disk to install laplink on, I'd say that you have access to another 5 1/4. You shouldn't need to copy off the program files. Just the data files. If its a 20 meg hard drive, that can't be that many files. Unless of course they are moving up to something that will also be running DOS.
 
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