Reading old drives
Jun. 8th, 2009 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tagrynI bought my first laptop, a Austin Vista notebook, sometime shortly after I started at Ohio State (~1997). I found it off of a refurbished computer auction site, and I remember being quite thrilled at the prospect of having my own computer and not having to walk in to campus every time I wanted to check my email (considering this was Ohio, some of those walks were unpleasant in snow, rain, and cold). I think I had it for about 3 years or so; it would be hopelessly outdated by today's standards, and had a bad problem with overheating, but it served me well for what it was.
Anyway, eventually the inevitable happened and it broke; as I recall, one day the screen shorted out. However, I still retained the hard drive with the data - email, photos, etc. - in the hope that someday I'd be able to retrieve it. Well, time passed, and eventually external hard drives became available, so I tried putting that HD in the one I have. Physically the connections all fit, but WinXP wouldn't read the drive. The drive, as it happens, was so old that XP read it as not having had partitions assigned to it - basically, it couldn't read the way Win95 had formatted the drive. And there the issue rested for another few years.
A couple of weeks back, I had the idea of putting the drive in my old laptop - it is an ancient Dell Win98 machine, I think it may even have been the one I bought after the Austin Vista. So I took out the hard drive in the Dell, put the Austin Vista into the drive carriage, and tried to put it into the computer again. The AV drive is a tiny bit bigger than the Dell one, so I had to push it in to get it inside, but finally it fit inside without the case breaking. And, amazingly, it booted up!
Have I mentioned how much XP is an improvement over Win95? Just browsing around on the drive to see what was on it was a reminder of how far we've come. The Dell has one major drawback: no USB drive ports. And Win95 doesn't recognize wireless cards. What to do?
In order to get the files off the drive to burn a backup CD, I eventually had to set up a direct cable connection using a null modem cable that I'd had an an artifact from a failed experiment using PC Relocator many years ago. I connected it to my wife's PC, which runs WinXP and has a parallel printer port (my current laptop is so advanced, they didn't bother to put a parallel port on it, figuring that technology was outdated). For anyone trying this, this link and this link were helpful. The setup didn't work until I reversed the usual setup so that the Win95 computer was identified as the guest and the XP computer as the host, even though the files were going Win95->XP, but it seemed to work. The connection was finicky, and I had to keep refreshing it after transferring a number of files, but eventually I managed to get the files I needed off the drive and onto the XP PC, and from there I burned the files onto a CD.
Reviving old drives and old data can be tricky, especially across platforms and operating systems, but this worked for me.
Anyway, eventually the inevitable happened and it broke; as I recall, one day the screen shorted out. However, I still retained the hard drive with the data - email, photos, etc. - in the hope that someday I'd be able to retrieve it. Well, time passed, and eventually external hard drives became available, so I tried putting that HD in the one I have. Physically the connections all fit, but WinXP wouldn't read the drive. The drive, as it happens, was so old that XP read it as not having had partitions assigned to it - basically, it couldn't read the way Win95 had formatted the drive. And there the issue rested for another few years.
A couple of weeks back, I had the idea of putting the drive in my old laptop - it is an ancient Dell Win98 machine, I think it may even have been the one I bought after the Austin Vista. So I took out the hard drive in the Dell, put the Austin Vista into the drive carriage, and tried to put it into the computer again. The AV drive is a tiny bit bigger than the Dell one, so I had to push it in to get it inside, but finally it fit inside without the case breaking. And, amazingly, it booted up!
Have I mentioned how much XP is an improvement over Win95? Just browsing around on the drive to see what was on it was a reminder of how far we've come. The Dell has one major drawback: no USB drive ports. And Win95 doesn't recognize wireless cards. What to do?
In order to get the files off the drive to burn a backup CD, I eventually had to set up a direct cable connection using a null modem cable that I'd had an an artifact from a failed experiment using PC Relocator many years ago. I connected it to my wife's PC, which runs WinXP and has a parallel printer port (my current laptop is so advanced, they didn't bother to put a parallel port on it, figuring that technology was outdated). For anyone trying this, this link and this link were helpful. The setup didn't work until I reversed the usual setup so that the Win95 computer was identified as the guest and the XP computer as the host, even though the files were going Win95->XP, but it seemed to work. The connection was finicky, and I had to keep refreshing it after transferring a number of files, but eventually I managed to get the files I needed off the drive and onto the XP PC, and from there I burned the files onto a CD.
Reviving old drives and old data can be tricky, especially across platforms and operating systems, but this worked for me.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 06:05 pm (UTC)Another thing I tried was loading it into the external HD mount and having my laptop set to boot from USB, except my BIOS isn't set up to allow that as an option. A newer laptop probably would have that, but it still would leave me with the problem of getting the data off the drive, given that Win95 wasn't recognizing my wireless cards & I suspect it wouldn't recognize a USB thumbdrive, either. Plug and play has come a long way since Win95.
I have a couple of different Linux stand-alone programs (Puppy, Ubuntu) as emergency-emergency last result recovery options, but I've yet to be able to get them to read files off my Windows-formatted HDs and haven't invested the time to figure out how to get them to do that.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 06:41 pm (UTC)Donna Gryn at 1:24pm June 8
I admire your cleverness in figuring things out and your persistence when you get an idea in your head about something you want to do. :)