On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Lyos Norezel wrote:
Hey y'all... I need some help. I recently acquired
a Compaq Portable(ye right... at 35LBS no one is crazy enough to carry this machine
around) II... with a hard drive and a 5.25 floppy disk drive. The hard drive apparently
has MSDOS 3.2 and some Novell application. When booted up it first checks the memory then
it checks active partions... then it starts going in some kinda loop looking for a file
server that isn't there. I don't have any other 5.25 floppy drives so I am unable
to create disks to transfer files to this box. I was wondering if it was possible to
connect the floppy drive to my linux box and copy the files to the disk(s) from there and
retransfer the drive to the compaq to use. Problem is that the Linux box is an RH9
platform on a PII (686) system. Would RH9 even have the needed drivers for a drive this
ancient? Can this be done or am I, for all intensive purposes, screwed?
Linux should have no problems writing to 5.25" floppy drives,
or old hard disks, assuming that the "driving" hardware is
still working.
Check out the kit at
http://crashrecovery.org/ to create a
small set of diskettes to boot the box with, and install a
working Linux on it. Then, the rest can be done over its
network connection (it has one, since they did Novell stuff
with it...)
Cheers,
Fred
--
Fred N. van Kempen, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Collector/Archivist
Visit the VAXlab Project at
http://VAXlab.pdp11.nl/
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Email: waltje(a)pdp11.nl BUSSUM, THE NETHERLANDS / Mountain View, CA, USA