There are also quite cheap bare bones USB hard disk adapters - take drive out of 486, plug into adapter, then clone it on virtually anything. I've had good results with sub $10 things on ebay like, uh ... roughly this
http://3.ly/SMwG - very handy to have if you have IDE drives around with useful stuff on them.
PG
On 15/04/2010, at 11:14 PM, Dylan Smith wrote:
> 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/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)
>
> 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.
.....