Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4393 mails)

[phil <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings folks,

I just recently ran into a dilema.  I was handed an old 286 running DOS 6.22 
on MFM Harddrives,  and told to burn it to CD.   The data was a book someone 
had written. 

The first problem I had was the BIOS had dumped because it had been shut off 
for at least a year.  No problem, enter the magic numbers and boom it's 1980 
Jan 1st, and we have 2 harddrives C: and D:  ;o)

Second problem was Floppy Disk drive was a 5 1/2" So, trying to back up the 
data that way was a total joke.  After formating several 5 1/2 " floppies and 
half of em being bad, I quickly decided that was a bad idea.

So, what was left?  I have no other computers that even USE a 5 1/2" floppy 
so anything that I was going to put on the 286 was going to be after I ripped 
the drive out and slaved it into another box.   Not to mention the hassle of 
running that damned setup disk to get into the bios over and over.  Even if I 
Had a spare 3.5" 1.44M floppy (which I don't)  it's a pain.

I had a null modem cable (parallel) and I used to run interlnk / intersrv all 
the time back in my bbs days.  This I thought would be my best hope.

So, I used a win98 box and intersrv on the 286.  Sucked the drive dry, burned 
the requested CD;  and hey--now I can nuke the box for parts.   ;o)

However, in hindsight, I was wondering what in Linux could connect to 
intersrv on that 286?  Getting that win98 box running meant shutting down a 
Linux workstation.  (I didn't like that, it wasn't the end of the world 
though.) 
I searched all over and couldn't come up with anything on how to get data 
transfer from "INTERSRV" to "Linux."  

If anyone has ever done this, do let me know.  I don't expect to have to do 
this again but, should it come up, I want to be able to do it in the time it 
takes to connect the cable and copy the data to a linux box.  

If there is no way to do it with a linux box, then my plan is to rebuild that 
box into a dual boot, win98 / DOS box.  (obviously it won't be a 286 anymore) 
 Just in case I ever have to do that again--purpose the box would be the 
ability to solve this kind of problem if it ever came up again.  It would be 
a tool I guess.

A lot of folks would laugh at this problem, I did too at first, but the data 
was important on that old 286.  Once that was realized it was no longer funny.