Getting files off an antique PC [solved!]

[neddie]

OK, so it took me ages to get this done, mainly because the machine in question is in another country from where I live and I haven't been there as often recently. Also the machine is not mine, and although I would gladly open up my own computer, I didn't want to scare the owner and I wanted to be extra sure that if something did stop working afterwards for whatever reason, that the owner didn't then blame it on the (for them) drastic things I'd done to it... yeah call me chicken but if it did break then it would be pretty difficult for me to get back and fix it. This is a 9-year-old machine and I don't know how fragile it is. Just imagine I install some software, the swap space then gets bumped up to some part of the (oooolllldddd) hard drive where there are bad sectors, it doesn't boot any more and needs a reinstall. I would not be popular. So the options I went through were:

 

* Floppy disk - no, the files were too big (total 170MB), and I didn't have another machine with a floppy drive

* Serial-serial - no, I might have been able to use the Windows Hyperterminal but I wasn't sure it would work between W95 and XP. And I couldn't find a cable and was too cheap to buy one just for this one-off when I'll probably never _ever_ need it again.

* Parallel-parallel - no, I found a cable but couldn't find any software to drive it.

* Install a network card / CD-writer - no, I didn't want to open the machine as explained above.

* Parallel port compact flash reader - works fine with Knoppix, but it draws power from a little round keyboard socket, and this machine had a different kind of socket. And the laptop has none.

 

So the answer was - an external parallel port zip drive! I didn't want to install drivers on the PC so I used Knoppix, booting just to level 2 (without KDE, icewm etc), mounted the drives and copied the files from the hard drives to the zip drive. Then I connected the zip drive to the laptop and from Mandriva copied the files over to the laptop hard drive. With 100MB disks it took just two goes, then I burnt the files to CD with K3B. I haven't installed any hardware or software on the old PC, haven't even written to the hard drives, and everything's exactly as it was :) Now if the machine dies in a few weeks, I'm not the villain who broke it, I'm the hero who rescued the files just in time ;)