My thanks for all the suggestions! 😁

I am most likely going to just test out most of the methods that I think would prove to be useful for my case:
As I already stated: CD-RW and USB.

mTCP http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/ seems useful for DOS.

changing HDD's.

I already have an SD card so possible usage of an SD to IDE.

Overall, networking sounds like the best option.

FTP like Filezilla might also work.

If all else fails I might give CF cards a try.

FTP has one big advantage I've used, resume file transfer

Besides having an FTP client for file transfer mTCP also has:

• An FTP server
• HTGet for downloading files from web servers directly
• An HTTP Server (coming soon)
• Netcat, for sending arbitrary stuff back and forth across a socket.

And if you are really hardcore, there is Xmodem and Ymodem built into the telnet client for when you get the urge to do some old-school BBSing.

candle_86 wrote:

FTP has one big advantage I've used, resume file transfer

Could you briefly outline what's required for FTP between a Windows 98 SE machine and a FTP client?

My all-in-one modem / router can act as a FTP server, I'd like to try this. It can also shared them as a folder, that works very well as well.

mbbrutman wrote:

Besides having an FTP client for file transfer mTCP also has:

• An HTTP Server (coming soon).

Ooooh, I look forward to that! 😎

TheVibe wrote:

My thanks for all the suggestions! :-D […]
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My thanks for all the suggestions! 😁

I am most likely going to just test out most of the methods that I think would prove to be useful for my case:
As I already stated: CD-RW and USB.

mTCP http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/ seems useful for DOS.

changing HDD's.

I already have an SD card so possible usage of an SD to IDE.

Overall, networking sounds like the best option.

Wheter or not networking is a good option or not depends on the system usage. In the temporary systems that I used to build and modify, USB sticks seem much more practical.
There are generic 'USB mass storage' drivers available for windows 98.

On older systems without USB: The IDE to SD (or CF) adapters allow for similar file transfers. When it serves as the primary drive, a system shutdown is necessary before taking out or inserting the memory card.

On the other hand, for a finished and static system; networking may be a rewarding project.

Blurredman wrote:

mbbrutman wrote:

Besides having an FTP client for file transfer mTCP also has:

• An HTTP Server (coming soon).

Ooooh, I look forward to that! 😎

Try it now - it's been available for download for testing for almost a year:

http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_HTTPServ.html

My prefered method is putting hard drive from the old PC into an enclosure and moving everything through the modern PC's USB port. Seems to me like the simplest solution.

philscomputerlab wrote:

candle_86 wrote:

FTP has one big advantage I've used, resume file transfer

Could you briefly outline what's required for FTP between a Windows 98 SE machine and a FTP client?

My all-in-one modem / router can act as a FTP server, I'd like to try this. It can also shared them as a folder, that works very well as well.

honestly my Windows 8.1 box hosts FTP with filezilla Server, and on my 98 box i installed Filezilla 2.2.2.0 which is the latest for 9x OS's and it just works. I can pause and resume even after a restart. It just works which is why I love it. Also you can simply type in at least on my server FTP:192.168.1.73 and connect to it without a client, though you loose things like pause and resume 🤣.

I have my premissions set so my 9x box's can drop files into a folder I created just for sending files back to the FTP server, while my general downloads folder is the home drive of the FTP.

Version 2.2.2.0, good to know. Will test it out. Yesterday I moved a 4 TB and 3 TB drive from my Media / TV PC and connected them to the modem / router that has two USB ports. This works very well. I can access through FTP or Windows explorer. Will test this from a Windows 98 SE machine when I get to it.

TheVibe wrote:

Yes, I have a pentium 3 with 2 USB ports.

The USB's are not plug and play, I have to install drivers for them?

Windows 98 doesn't have a generic USB mass storage driver, but you can add one yourself (nusb-something-or-other - I may have a copy of it somewhere if someone else doesn't) which works fairly well IME. Some older USB flash drives will have their own drivers for Windows 98 as well (I know some Lexar and PNY drives, for example, do); not sure it'd be worth tracking one of those down, but if you have some old (we're talking like <1GB) flash drives laying around, it may be worth checking if they have specific Win98 drivers.

Removing the hard drive will not be possible since my main pc is an iMac with windows 8.1.

You could always use an external enclosure - pull the drive, put it in the enclosure, plug that into the iMac via USB or FireWire (or whatever it uses) and go about things that way.

How exactly does networking work? It sounds like a nice option.

Honestly it's my preference, when possible. You'd need NICs in all machines, and a router/switch/hub/whatever (if you have crossover cable you can plug them straight into each other). I'm not sure how universal NICs are for P3s - I know mine doesn't have one built-in, so it has to use a PCI card. Most (all?) modern computers have a built-in NIC though. Performance may be worse than pulling the hard-drive depending on what kind of hardware you have and how big the files you need to move are.

What I've done with networking is to just enable a folder or partition as a "share" on a machine, and then move files onto and off of it as needed. My router also supports USB storage, so I leave a large-ish USB flash drive plugged in to make sure I always have some network storage available (e.g. if only one of my computers is powered on).

Candle_86's FTP idea is also pretty slick. 😀

It takes a bit of setup & would require you to purchase a USB modem for your new PC, but another (last resort) option I've used to transfer files between a new and old system was connecting their modems directly to each other, then using HyperTerminal or something similar to transfer the files. Basically, I'd open the terminal on both systems, tell one system to dial a fake number (doesn't matter what), then enter the ATA command on the other system, and they'd basically start up their own little dial-up connection to each other. Once they're connected, I just use the terminal program's file transfer capabilities to copy the files. It's slower than a constipated sloth and can get really tedious if you have a lot of files to transfer, but it works! This is how I backed up the hard drive on a very old 286 portable system. It had a proprietary hard drive that couldn't simply be plugged into the newer system, the floppy drive didn't work, and I couldn't use Interlnk because the parallel port didn't work and I lacked a crossover serial cable. So, modem-to-modem it was. 20MB of data at 1200 baud...boy was that fun!

As for using CD-RW, yes that is a very viable option, but I do need to comment that I've had lots of issues in the past with older systems (Older than about 1998 or so) not being able to properly read CD-RW discs. Back in the early 2000s when Win9x systems were still fairly common for me to work on (Ran my own freelance computer repair business at the time), on average half of them would not properly read my utilities discs, which at the time were on CD-RW. IIRC I researched this problem once before, and it has something to do with the dye layer on RW media being too dark and not reflecting enough of the laser beam for the less-sensitive older drives to properly detect. CD-R seems to work a lot better for older drives from my experience, but it's still hit-and-miss once you get back into drives from the early 90s.