14 Jan
2005
14 Jan
'05
10:28 p.m.
Hello, cctech!
I recently recieved a call from a friend of a friend regarding a laptop
that has come into her posession after a coworker of her died. She was
doing some sort of environmental research, and all her work is stored on
this computer.
I tried taking the path of turning it on and just doing a copy that way.
No such luck - the plasma display has a garbled and not stable display -
text is garbled to the point that I can't read it, and it basically
looks like it's about to go straight to hell. It does boot from harddisk
- I feared that the plasma might be sensitive to power variations or
something like that, and thus tried getting the machine apart.
...
Is the floppy drive 1.44M?
If it's a T3100 (8Mhz), the floppy drive is 720k - if it's a T3100E
(12Mhz), the floppy drive should be 1.44M.
If it boots to DOS, or you can get to a DOS prompt (ALT-F4/Enter in
Win 3.x), then you should be able to communicate with the DOS prompt
via a terminal on the serial port: CTTY COM1
[I recall that the default speed is somewhat low, but it won't really
matter as long as you can figure out what it is with your terminal
emulator - if you like you can blind-type a MODE command first to set
the serial parameters]
Once you get to a DOS prompt, you can format diskettes and copy files
to them - Don't try to run any non-command-line software!
Another option would be to use INTERLNK - you can "blind type" the
MODE and COPY CON: commands required for RCOPY and then run INTERSVR,
or you can prepare a DOS boot disk that runs INTERSVR in the AUTOEXEC
and boot the machine from floppy.
You could also use the boot disk approach to get LAPLINK running on
the machine etc...
As long as the machine is still actually running, it shouldn't be that
hard to get the data off - Enjoy the LSI-11.
Regards,
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html