laptop hard drive recovery

[Jay]

My trusty (until today) Compaq 286 laptop took a crap. Actually, the floppy drive has taken the crap, which means that I can't get anything on or off of it. The machine is a compaq LTE Lite 4/25 that I have run for years.

Obviously, I would like to recover a lot of my data, including codeplugs, some of the no longer available RSS packages, including some that have had custom mods done to them for various radios. I have some stuff backed up, but not everything.

So, I am looking for a solution to recover this stuff. Does anyone know of a solution to remove the hard drive and back it up to another device? Keep in mind I can't add any software to the computer, so stuff like laplink is out.

Jay

[mike38015]

go buy a USB IDE external hard drive housing, take the drive out of your old computer and mount it in the housing, you now have a portable hard drive.

http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-NST-360U2- ... 710&sr=8-3

[kf4sqb]

Another option can be found here. These units are great if you do (or expect to do) a lot of this kind of thing. Best thing about this unit is that it will work with everything (standard IDE, laptop IDE, and all SATA drives) but SCSI. I've had one of these for a little over a year now, and it works great.

[Terry_Glover]

Internal floppy drives are cheap and are not difficult at all to replace. Why not consider replacing the floppy drive in the laptop with a new/used one? It shouldn't cost you more than around $20.00 if you DIY.

[Jay]

Thanks for the replies, folks. I am sure I am not the first (or the last) to have this issue with their old programming laptop. Fortuantely, I have had a couple of IBM thinkpads on standby for just this event.

As for replacing the floppy, this one is a beast to get to, and the PC is all ready in poor condition from years of use. A new drive would also cost me more than the computer did!

I'm going to give one of the USB to IDE adapters a try....My knowledge of hard drive formats from the 80s is kinda weak, so I wanted some advice before proceeding with trying to read this old hard drive with a device like this.

Jay

[mruwave]

An alternative I've used for years is here:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... =M501-1030

...$10 bucks and you get a permanent enclosure.

If all else fails, there's an old serial transfer program called 'Fastwire' that works very well....slow, but well. If you can't find it on-line, PM me and I'll email it to you (It's WAY outdated guiltware).

- Jim

[john9912]

The programs like laplink had a way to load itself through the serial port. This didn't work through the parallel port cable. I don't remember the commands, but maybe the instructions are in the help files. It required a serial null modem cable. You started laplink on one computer, on the other computer you typed in a mode command (with baud rate, data bits, stop bits parity, etc..) from the dos prompt, then another second command from the dos prompt. You sent the program on the machine running the laplink and it would start file transfer. It was not necessary to run the exe file on the second computer. Sorry I don't remember all the commands, it has been MANY years since I have done it.

[tvsjr]

I do mass transfers from my old boatanchor to my XP Pro box using Laplink 5 (running native on the laptop and inside the serial-modified DOSbox application on XP) and a serial cable. It's somewhat slow (about 25MB/hr.) but it's nice to be able to build and maintain your directory structure on a big computer, then dump it over to the boatanchor.