On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:33:36 -0700, Don Y
wrote:

On 2/5/2016 1:08 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:
snipped
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

It's not just the physical/bus interface (ISA vs PCI). Much old software
talked directly *to* the hardware. So, expected to see particular registers
at particular IO ports that caused particular things to happen *in* the
hardware. Much of that has now been virtualized (as it should have been
ages ago -- but MS is always a decade or three behind the times) and likely
won't work.

I keep a Compaq Portable 386 for the express purpose of supporting legacy
hardware and software devices. Granted, it's only a 20MHz machine. But,
most of the hardware and software that I'm supporting were *designed* for that
sort of horsepower. So, not really "slow"!

I have an old socket 7 (P1) machine here that has't puked up any bad
capacitors yet and it will still run old drives (40meg was the last
one I dumped) but most of my legacy stuff is on SCSI drives and they
work fine on my fax/scanner/file server Latitude laptop.
The scanner is SCSI and I have an open port on the cable.
I still have the "data" drive that was on my work system when I
retired in 96 (including the backup of the C but it is also spinning
on this machine ... the whole thing about the size of a short video
clip.