--- In
Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, John Michaud <greyfox1143@...> wrote:
>
> Trevor - Yes the old PC is a 486DX system that is running a very old version of CircuitCam/Boardmaster 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system so there is really no way to ghost the system since there is no USB on the system and all the expansion is so out of date (ISA bus) that I cannot use PCI add in cards. What I would like to do is find a XP version of the software and upgrade the computer to drive the system but the software is very expensive. So that is why I thought getting a open source software would work. However not knowing the specs of the machine it would be difficult to just try and figure out the X/Y on the machine. I wonder if upgrading the boardmaster software would work then trying to find a software that would communicate to the boardmaster software. I looked into the software upgrade
> last year and I believe that I was quoted around $700 for the upgrade for the 93s. I'm living in the Portland Oregon area USA.
>
> John
>
>
This is easy, pop the drives out and image them using one of those cheap USB to IDE converters, or stick them in a slightly newer PC with multiple IDE ports, or plug in a null modem cable and transfer the data over the serial port, or remove one drive at a time, boot off a floppy or the backup drive you plug in, or pop an ISA ethernet card in the machine and copy over the network, etc. There are many simple and straightforward ways of doing this. You could even back it up to floppy disks, it's probably not very large. If you can get the software off, you can probably get it to run under XP too, or you could run a Win 3.1 virtual machine, Virtual PC is freely downloadable from MS, but that is probably not necessary, most 3.1 apps will work just fine under XP.
That said, I still have working PCs of that era in semi-regular use, so I would not worry too much about failure, especially if it was seldom used. Heck I still have a working hard drive for my Apple II that's pushing up on 30 years old.