14 Jan
2015
14 Jan
'15
2:52 a.m.
On 01/13/2015 02:32 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote:
In the mid-90's I had a Packard Bell computer that
ran
Windows for workgroups 3.11. The computer is long gone,
but I saved the disk. It is a 420 MB Conner. I recently
tried to recover the data by attaching it to one of those
IDE/SATA to USB devices and read it under Windows7, didn't
work.
I am able to copy files to floppy, but the stuff I want to
save won't fit on a floppy.
I put the disk in an old PC and it will boot to DOS, it
tries to start WIN3.1 but exits because of some missing
sound card hardware.
What is the path of least resistance here? Is linux any
help?
Yes, Linux will be able to easily read the disk. Once you
have a Linux system up,
plug in the drive. it MIGHT automatically mount the drive as
/media/<something> or you might have to manually mount it
if it doesn't automatically detect the file system type.
the commands would be something like :
If you don't know what partition is the user data one, do this:
sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
<supply user's password>
p
lists out the partitions on the drive, and the file system types
q <get out of fdisk before you hit the wrong key and cause
data loss>
/dev/sdb would be the second drive on the system, which
could be the CD,
if so, the added drive might be /dev/sdc
ls /dev/sd* will show the various drives as /dev/sd<letter>
and available partitions as /dev/sd<letter><number>
mkdir /mnt/disk
sudo mount -t msdos /dev/sd<letter><number> /mnt/disk
now, the disk should be mounted under /mnt/disk, and you can
list it, copy files, etc.
Jon