Getting data out of an old PC

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SoTrue

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I recently helped my father-in-law buy a second hand PC. He is now up and running again with Outlook, Word, Excel and Acrobat Reader. That is basically all he needs.

He used to have an old PC (DX4 I think), with 1 Gb HD, Win95, only parallel and serial port, etc. No network card. His e-mail software was something called Internet e-mail - I think it is built into Win95. His e-mail file is 300 Mb.

What is the easiest way to copy the e-mail file to another PC or notebook, without spending too much? I have a spare CD-writer (Sony) but do not have the installation disk. I also have a spare network card.

How easy is it to install the old HD into a modern computer as a second HD and copy to CD from there?

Any help will be appreciated.
 
moving the HD will be the easiest thing... just check the jumper settings and you're good to go. If you're putting it on a cable with another device, one of them needs to be master, the other slave. The devices should have labels on them showing how to correctly set the jumpers.
 
Same here - connect the older one as slave, copy the data across, make sure it's the correct files and all, then disconnect the slave drive.
 
Thanks for the advice!

Do I have to make changes to the BIOS of the receiving PC to indicate that there is now a second (slave) HD, or will this happen automatically?
 
On fairly all new pc it will automatically pick it up, ie Intel motherboards, but best is to go into the BIOS and just make sure.
 
It might not work too switch the HDD if the BIOS settings on the DX4 was not default.(clusters and heads settings)
Installing the NIC then might be the easiest.
 
Get a 2.5" external usb chassis that uses IDE (ie, a IDE chassis, not a SATA one :p ).
Transplant the drive and plug that into the new machine.
Go wild

Or create a BartPE cd / Use a knoppix CD and use that to write a cd backup of the data
 
Last edited:
repitah said:
Get a 2.5" external usb chassis that uses IDE (ie, a IDE chassis, not a SATA one :p ).
Transplant the drive and plug that into the new machine.
Click to expand...

Sybaritic advertises a Vantec CB-IUSB20 IDE to USB Adapter - it seems it is as easy as taking out the HDD, connecting it to the IDE end, and connecting the USB end into another computer/notebook?
 
Definately use the slave option to transfer your data. Place the Win95 HDD in the newer computer and then copy it over. This would mean you won't have to fiddle to much in the bios. Just make sure the Win95 drive is set to slave.
 
Realised I had misread the computer type. you'll need a 3.5" hdd chassis if you want to go that route, else install an old network card.
Or unplug the hdd connect it up to your new pc, make very sure you're not going to boot off it (presuming you new pc is using sata) by checking in the bios. this will be safer than playing with the jumpers on the old hdd (and that can be a nightmare by itself)
 
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