AL_n said:
Hi all,
I have an old Compaq Armada 4220T laptop with no USB ports and a dead
floppy drive. Floppy drives for these old laptops do occasionally surface
but they are not cheap.
I'm never likely to need this laptop again, after I salvage the old data
files from its hard drive. How can I get the data off it, cheaply?
The laptop has a printer port and a serial port and a port marked IOIO. Is
it possible that I could connect an external floppy drive to one of those
ports - or perhaps find some kind of serial-to-female-USB adapter or
parallel-t-female-USB adapter that would work? The laptop has a docking
station with a SC-Rom drive but it is read-only drive. It also has a PCMCIA
port.
I tried removing the hard drive, hoping it would fit one of my USB portable
harddrive cases, but the connector is different.
Did anyone make protable hard-drives prior to USB? If so, which port did
you plug them into?
I just want to get the data off with as little outlay as possible.
Thank for any helpful suggestions.
Al
"USB portable harddrive cases"
You could pick up one of these, or even borrow one. These convert from
44 pin dual row 2mm centers on the laptop side, to 40 pin
dual row 0.1" centers on the desktop side. You connect the desktop pin
side, to your USB 3.5" enclosure ribbon cable. The hard drive can draw
up to 1 amp from the 5V rail in the enclosure, when the 2.5" drive
spins up.
"Laptop 2.5" to Desktop 3.5" IDE Hard Drive Adapter Converter" $2.36
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119245
"Cables To Go Laptop to IDE Hard Drive Adapter Cable - 2.5" Laptop to 3.5" Desktop" $4.99
http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=81&item_id=016080
The reason I list two of them, is I could order one online for 2.36 plus
shipping, or drive to a brick and mortar store like the second entry,
and get it today for $5.
In terms of "exposures" with such an adapter, the pins on the adapter can
be bent, if you're not careful. Some of the older 80 wire IDE cables have
reasonably lubricated connectors and won't fight too much. I have some
more modern IDE cables with higher insertion force. The adapter doesn't give
any protection to the pins. (Some other IDE connector formats have the
plastic box around the pins to protect them.)
The power connector is the other weak point. The pins in the connector will
flop around, so you have to wiggle them a bit to get the power connector
in your USB housing, to mesh with the adapter power connector. The adapter
power connector only has two pins, because the small laptop drives just
use the +5V power source. Whereas, the larger 3.5" drives use both +5V and
+12V, and have a couple ground pins as well. That's why the adapter doesn't
have all the pins on its power connector. They're not needed.
You can probably find a pinout diagram online, to understand why the
44 pin and 40 pin, not all the pins get connected. The extra pins
on the 44 pin were intended for power, which is why the power cable goes
on the pins on one end of the connector.
*******
A cheaper still solution, would depend on materials on hand. I have a
collection of RS232 cabling, null modem cables, male to female adapters,
9 to 25 pin adapters, the works. My bag of junk is probably worth a hundred
bucks at one time. I used to use that to get myself out of a jam at work,
but I've also used it to join balky computers together here at home.
For example, I can boot a Linux computer, point the console port output
to the serial port, then use Hyperterm on the Windows PC, to talk to the
Linux computer. If the Linux computer has a bug and freezes, I can then use
the Hyperterm port to test whether the machine is responsive. This is typically
used if Xwindows has a focus/selection bug (and the GUI freezes), or dbus
dies and the mouse/keyboard on the Linux machine stop working. Frequently,
the CPU is still running, and all that is needed is a working software
path.
So if you had another computer with a serial port, you'd need a "rolled" cable
(null modem cable), so the tx and rx get flipped from one end of the cable
to the other. As far as I can remember, a regular cable is intended for
connection between a DCE and a DTE. To connect two similar devices
(two computers over serial port), you need a null modem dongle to swap
the wiring. Once that is done, two computers can be connected together,
and talk over Hyperterm.
But that's the weak part of this plan. You have no way to get software
into the computer. No working network connection. The floppy used to
be your "port of entry", but it is broken.
And I don't even know if Windows 95 has Hyperterm (bundled with my copy
of WinXP). Hyperterm has a menu entry to "send a text file", and apparently
that uses Kermit protocol.
Back in the day, we might have used copies of the actual Kermit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)
Back in the lab at work, I used to do some sort of
procedure between a Mac and a PC, which involved something
like "type blah ... com1". Some sort of command which
streams a file out the PC serial port. And I had some other
command on the Mac end, to suck up the data. No Kermit
protocol was used. No Zmodem protocol either. No error checking.
After the PC command was executed, you followed that by sending
some control character. I transferred maybe fifty files that
way, at God awful speed. Because the boss didn't care how
you got stuff done, just that it got done. So that's an example
of just how crude this stuff can get. I expect you could use
such a protocol (no Kermit) on your current setup. I just
don't remember all the details. I might have been running
those two pigs at 4800 or 9600 baud. I'm guessing the PC
I was given, didn't have a network card, and that's why
I was doing it
Good times.
*******
It's possible to set up networking over IRDA. I've never used
an IRDA port, so don't know the details. There are USB to IRDA
dongles to plug into a modern PC, to give you a "receiving end"
on the other PC. There may be a red plastic lens or aperture
on the Armada.
The fun part, is data rate. A proper (good) IRDA runs at 4Mbit/sec.
Which is 0.5MB/sec. That would give a painful but useful transfer
rate, to get off a few valuable files.
The motherboards I have here, came with IRDA headers, but they
use the slower rate. I think the best those motherboard ones
could manage, is 115Kbit/sec. Which is really not all that much
better than a modem. The main advantage, is if the OS happens
to have a TCP/IP stack to run over IRDA.
(only if you're interested)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Data_Association
Does Win95 have file sharing ? Working on that method, would
only be worthwhile if you knew for sure the whole protocol stack
was present. Just too many details.
*******
They made ZIP drives with parallel connectors on them. My ZIP
drive cartridges hold 250MB of data (size varies with vintage),
and I think my drive still works. Mine has the USB connector on
it, and the previous generation were parallel. There is a picture
of one of the older parallel port versions in this article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
You would need a well stocked junk bin, to have one of those sitting
around. Those drives seemed to be popular with certain segments
of the computer user population. Perhaps photographers were
using those at one time, doing backups or machine to machine
transfers. I think the reason I bought my drive, is we had
a drive at work as well (one drive, shared over a whole
bunch of computers).
*******
So right now, from this distance, the $5 adapter purchased
from a local computer store is looking the most practical.
if you pay yourself $5 an hour to work on computers, I cannot
imagine any of the other methods being done in an hour. You'd
need to do at least an hour's worth of online research first.
Paul
