Homebrew PCBs

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.com
Sent: 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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