There's a hole in the bucket
Entry posted by EricBall in Old Computers
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I've been clearing out the basement by selling or giving away stuff which hasn't been used in a decade or more.
One of the items which I plan on getting rid of is an old IBM Thinkpad 765L. Amazingly it still works (although the battery doesn't hold a charge, which isn't surprising) and it even has a clean copy of Windows 98 installed. It also seems to have what appears to be files restored from old backups. Files which I aren't on my external backup drive. So before I put it up on Kijiji I need to copy off the files, but this has turned out to be a little more difficult than I expected.
The Thinkpad doesn't have a USB port so I can't simply plug in the external backup drive and copy them over.
My first plan was to connect the Thinkpad to the router and copy the files to a USB drive using the router's built-in file share. Unfortunately, while I have two Etherjet cards the one Etherjet cable I have is bad. So the laptop recognizes the card, but doesn't get an IP address.
The second plan was to pull the drive from the Thinkpad, connect it to an IDE to USB adapter I have and read the files directly from the drive. But my iMac and Windows laptops refuse to recognize the drive and even Linux fails to boot with the drive connected.
Simply copying the files to floppy (as I have both a USB floppy drive and a the floppy drive for the Thinkpad) isn't an option as the files are ~300MB. What the Thinkpad does have is a serial port. So I should be able to connect it via a null modem cable to another computer and then transfer the files that way. Of course none of my main computers have serial ports. However, I have an old Dell mini tower (which I had planned on getting rid of as well, good thing I hadn't yet) with a serial port; although it doesn't have a functional OS nor will it boot off USB.
So the next question is what software can I use to transfer the files. Back in the day I might have used Interlnk+Intersrv, but while I can boot DOS 6 from diskette (have a stack of those too), it can't access the hard disk (likely because it doesn't support FAT32). After some searching I found PD Zmodem which is a DOS program that includes both a ZMODEM client and server and will transfer entire directory trees. PERFECT! And FreeDOS includes FAT32 support, so I should be good to go. Once the files are transferred from the Thinkpad to the Dell I'm fairly certain I will be able to transfer them to the external drive by booting Linux.
Unfortunately FreeDOS doesn't seem to include a simple downloadable boot floppy. So instead my plan is to download the LiveCD, boot the Dell from that and then create a boot floppy for the Thinkpad. But this morning I discovered I don't actually have any blank CD-Rs! Hopefully the Dollar Store or Walmart still sells them.
I did was able to pick up a null modem cable at a local computer store (after much searching - and I seem to have bought the last one). For some strange reason it's a male to female cable ?!? So then I had to remember whether the serial port on a computer is male or female so I could also pick up an adapter. (It's a male port on the computer so I needed a female to female adapter.)
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