Ah - Yes that is a thought I would need to boot with a floppy since there is no CD-ROM installed. I suppose I could ghost it over the LAN and see if that would work. I also thought of just pulling the drives out and ghosting to new IDE drives and booting them in a modern system with windows 3.11 on a virtual machine. I suppose there are a few ways of getting the software off the drives just very limited with this PC.
________________________________
From: Dylan Smith <
dyls@...>
To:
Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.comSent: Thu, April 15, 2010 6:14:27 AM
Subject: Re: [Homebrew_PCBs] Re: LPKF 93s
On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 06:06:56AM -0700, John Michaud wrote:
> Trevor - Yes the old PC is a 486DX system that is running a very old
> version of CircuitCam/Boardmas ter on a Windows 3.11 platform. The PC
> runs but I'm so afraid that due to the age the hard drive won't
> operate very long. The real tragedy is the LPFK folks installed 2 hard
> drives in the system so there is really no way to ghost the system
> since there is no USB on the system and all the expansion is so out of
> date (ISA bus)
There are several options for you. The hard discs, I suspect, are IDE
drives and will probably be readable by any pre-SATA PC motherboard. You
can boot the newer motherboard with a Linux live CD, and then make a
bitwise copy of the disc to another IDE disc, or alternatively use some
disc imaging software for Windows.
If that's not going to fly, you can also use a Linux live CD with the
old PC, something lightweight like the Trinity Rescue Kit, and then make
a bitwise copy of the discs over ethernet to another machine. You can do
this with something like:
dd if=/dev/hda bs=128K | gzip -c | nc someothermachine 2000
and on the receiving machine:
nc -l 2000 > discdump.gz
I suspect you may also find ISA cards on eBay, there certainly should be
ethernet cards and USB adapters. Win 3.1 may not support them but a
Linux livecd may.
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