Don't give up on the 5 1/2" floppy yet. Did you clean the rw heads with a Q-tip and isopropol alcohol? (Or run one of those cleaning floppies in it?) JLK On Sunday 04 November 2001 05:42, phil wrote:
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.