Page 2 - Parking a hard drive - Really old computer

because you could charge 'em another few bucks, plus backup charges to protect the IPR theiren.

Not something to be scared of. We've built machines for quite a large process control concern, putting windows III on a PIV, because they couldn't afford to have the software rewritten ( I seriously doubt that, given their latest quarter's figures ), but they paid handsomely for those windows III machines, but all good things must come to an end

I have a friend who's keeping her books on a DOS 3.3 laptop.

It says:
Seagate Technology 1275MB-ST31276A

disk drives are dirt cheap. Buy a few terabyte drives. copy all the irreplaceable data to new disks.

Move new disks. most computers.

You should never, ever, have irreplacable data, programs, etc. in one place. Make backups.

These days, disks are so cheap, just use a hard disk to backup.

If you have many terabytes of data, that is a different problem, but then you will have revenue to pay for a serious backup.

1-800-SEAGATE, give them the model number, someone may be able to assist

@fishtoprecords Did you miss this part of what Hiker said?


Any computer that old won't be compatible with current hard drives. It will probably be limited to drives under 500MB. Also it will be using a different interface for the drives as well. It's certain that EIDE and SATA drives will not work with a 20 year old PC.

Also, the part that makes the computer irreplaceable is the software already installed on it. The company that made the software isn't around anymore, and we they haven't been able to find another software that does the same thing...

The company with the computer has switched owners several times, and even went for a period of time where the plant was pretty much abandoned... so finding the installation disks would probably be impossible.

The data on the drive is unimportant.... the software is all that matters on it....

@Ax: Yeah, I need to find some time to give them a call. Thanks.

Based on your explanation it sounds like the software only exists as data on the drive, thus the data on the drive is actually critically important...

According to the manual the drive is old, but not that old.

The manual implies that the drive is circa 1996. It uses standard power (4 pin molex) and data connectors (PATA / IDE) and has self parking heads.

You should have absolutely no trouble backing up or replacing the drive as there is nothing particular special or obsolete (except for the small size) about the drive.

In fact, I would highly highly recommend backing up the drive. The cost of a compatible backup drive is trivial compared to the amount that you stand to lose if the drive dies during shipping.

Maybe I misspoke a little.... yes, it exists as data, but it is currently installed. I always consider data and installed software differently.... When switching over an installation from one computer (or hard drive) to another, software should generally be reinstalled as opposed to just copied over.

They didn't mention the hard drive ever being replaced, and the machine's been used since the early 80's... Guess it's not entirely as old as they thought.

Thanks.

If the software is that old it's unlikely to actually depend on the registry, but if you could install regspy then you'd know for sure, so software could just be dependant on relative file paths

What's the OS? Do you know the motherboard?

You can make a one to one copy of the drive to another drive and it should function exactly as before. A hard drive does not consider "data" and installed programs to be different.

No, but the OS might

A computer of that age probably isn't using UUIDs to figure out what drive it is...it can't hurt to make an exact clone of the drive.

There's a lot of basic ignorance here. Ax is trying to skate around that and not be rude. Hell, I am too. Shock, shock.

Find an old copy of Partition Magic, circa 1996 or so and clone the disk.

What version of Windows is it really? WFW 3.11 perhaps? I can take that cloned image, install it on a box that is contemporary to the WFW 3.11 period and very quickly (within an hour or two) isolate the "install" of the program (all the files, registry settings, environment variables, the whole enchilada) and image it. If you're lucky the software in question hasn't got any kind of anti-pirating scheme, but even if it does, I can discover that and hack around it.

Then you install OS/2 Warp (whatever the last version was) because that has a WFW compatibility layer that is superior to the original in most respects. You can install Warp on more modern hardware and extend the life of that application at least another 10 years. Moving the app install into the OS/2 Warp box is a bit tricky sometimes and might take a while to get right (maybe a person week). If the software has any anti-pirating, it's probably pretty lame and easy to thwart. The best schemes actually employed third party DLL's and dongles. Worst case scenario is that you have to reverse engineer a DLL/dongle so you can hack around it (usually just replace it).

Does the application require a dongle?