My drive is beginning to fail me!

[pentium]

After a good 20 years of operation the 20 mb mfm drive in my epson equity II has begun to fail. I have to get everything off the system but there is a problem.
My 360k drive is becoming flaky and some dos commands relating to copying, formatting and moving have already been damaged.
I own an ibm data migration set which connects two computers via parallel port for the purpose of moving data but the disk which holds the program to send data is on 3 1/2" floppy while the receiving program is on a 5 1/4" (pretty much reverse of what I want.) I got a 9600 baud modem but I don't know of any services that can handle a system this old. I do however own a copy of procomm plus.

OR...

Can I just pull the drive and it's card and place it in another system and from there move everything onto another drive?

[Topcat]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

20mb!?? atleast it wouldnt take too long to back it up!

[willawake]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

20 years is pretty good!

i am wondering if i should trust the newest stuff past a year.

[kc8adu]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

i do this often to save stuff from old cnc and industrial stuff.
i pull the controller and drive and plant it in my testbed system.use ghost to pull an image if i can or just copy the important files/folders

[pentium]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

i pull the controller and drive and plant it in my testbed system.use ghost to pull an image if i can or just copy the important files/folders

The thing is I don't have ghost.

20mb!?? atleast it wouldnt take too long to back it up!

Try to imagine that I don't have a floppy drive at all.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it won't

[dood]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

I thought this was going to be a thread about Viagra... damn.

[yanz]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

i have a conner 20mb hdd that still good to this day!

[kc8adu]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

might be tough to find but there are 8 bit isa 1.44 controllers around.

[pentium]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

I have a box of old controllers.

[gonzo0815]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

You can download the UBCD, there are some good hdd cpartion copy programs 4free.
If it is to big to dl, may be you can get them from their weppages.

[pentium]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

thanks man.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

There is also a dos program called Dolly that works great for sector by sector copies of drives. Not sure if it would work with anything other than IDE though.

Not sure if it will help, but can you connect the 5 1/4 floppy drive to a newer PC and put a copy program such as Laplink or Dolly on it?

Also, did you try cleaning the heads on the 360K drive?

[Maxxarcade]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

Almost forgot, I've got an Epson Equity 1+ with a bunch of custom hardware in it that was used in a PA/central clock/alarm system rack at a school. It has cables that connect to to a couple rackmount boxes full of optoisolators and stuff. Not sure what it does, but I'd love to find out. All I get when I power it up is a beep and a blinking cursor in the top left corner.

Does your Epson have the 5 1/4" floppy that has the spring loaded eject button instead of the older style flip down lever/door? I've never seen that type of mechanism on anything but a 3 1/2" drive.

[Rainbow]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

I have a 5.25" floppy like that and it's made by Canon, IIRC.
You can use serial null-modem cable or parallel laplink cable to transfer the data. Norton Commander can be used to do that.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

I think the issue was getting some transferring software to the computer with the 360K floppy. The only programs I know of that are small enough to fit in a 360K boot disk are Dolly or Laplink. So basically what needs to be done is, connect the 5 1/4 drive to a newer computer running dos-win98 (XP doesn't support 5 1/4" drives), make a dos boot disk using SYS, copy the program to it, put the drive back in the Epson, and fire it up. There is a program that comes with DOS for transferring files too, but I forgot how to set it up.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

I think I have an old copy of Laplink Pro somewhere, but I can't upload that can I? I think it is still copyrighted despite being made in the late 80's or so. I think Laplink can install itself on a remote machine over serial or parallel as well.

[pentium]

Re: My drive is beginning to fail me!

don't worry. I managed to assemble a crude system so I could make new ibm software floppies that work. It took a while but it's fine now.