Two of the three ZIP drives I owned died, one with the click of death. As for the third one, it probably still works, but all my ZIP disks are bad now. The only thing I would trust ZIP disks for is a temporary data transfer, like how you'd use a CDRW. So in that case, it would probably be sufficient for the purpose of this thread. Keep the data on there less than a day and it should hold up. 😮

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the ''in-those-days-mighty'' LPT cable 😀. LPTLink was quite the fastest (if you had it) solution (not talking about the transfer rate), no boring and long installation/configuration of any devices, just to have a Dos Navigator or other stuff...Yes, it wasn't that fast (now talking about the data transfer), but you could wait those 10 (or less) minutes to transfer DOOM 2, right? 😈

as a sidenote, my c2d ASUS mobo does not have an lpt port , like 90% of new mobos

Gosh you got me 😀 , forgot about this little NUISANCE of technological (de)progress. I mostly use my laptop FS Esprimo 9250 which has a docking station and the LPT of coure (thanks japs, I love you for this). But yes, average systems don't possess this port anymore...ufff, so I would suggest some LPT PCI card 😁... otherwise yes, the USB->IDE solution (which I use frequently) is tedious, but acceptable still (hope for a long time).

Shodan486 wrote:

Yes, it wasn't that fast (now talking about the data transfer), but you could wait those 10 (or less) minutes to transfer DOOM 2, right? 😈

Hehe, I remember back in 2005 backing up my entire 486's hard drives, a total of about 8 GB using NC5 and a parallel cable... it took most of the day or so <G>.

(re: 'click of death')

I had totally forgotten about that. I still have my (still working) ZIP drive, but it was the fourth one that I had went through after buying the original back in the day. The fourth one was a keeper though.

Now, their tape backups were a different story... I never found a Ditto that worked worth a crap (that is, except for the cool little red LED in it <LOL> -> http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/Weeds_486DX4-100.htm ). The one that is (still) in my 486 was the *tenth* replacement that I got from Iomega, an even that one NEVER made a single dependable backup! On the other hand though, I *did* aquire an Iomega t-shirt and 10 ZIP floppies from Iomega for my troubles 😀

New IDE-USB adapters don't like old HDDs and old 386s don't like new HDDs...

Ah, right, so scratch that 🙁

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the ''in-those-days-mighty'' LPT cable

rfnagel mentioned it, only he called it parallel cable, same thing 😀

keropi, maybe burning CDs is still an option. As long as you have the burner standing somehwere firm, you don't need to have it in a 5 1/4" drive bay. If you happen to live in Europe, I have a Plextor px-w1210ts CD-RW drive (SCSI) I would wish to sell 😀

nah, I don't want any kind of device next to the machine... I will mod a CF slot somewhere...
btw I am Greek

Nah, I must have been sleeping while browsing this thread, you're right Dominus...thanks for pointing out, at least for others 😀

prophase_j wrote:

GL1zdA wrote:

I planned to use ZIP/Jaz drives, but they are to fragile.

My zip drive and disk have had some fun times, but never stopped working. Going on 11 years old. As long as your drive dosen't have the "click of death", I would think this solution as ideal next to networking. Make me wonder what you plan/are doing to yours 😀

I think the disks I bought are bad. When I insert them, the Jaz drive will have to read it for at least 2 minutes to show them in Explorer. Then I can copy files, but it's very unreliable - it fails on large files, sometimes I can't copy the files back.

On any old system with a PCI slot, such as my 486 and early pentium systems running Win95 OSR2.1 and Win98 I have had great success using Dynex branded 2-port USB 2.0 PCI cards easily found on ebay along with old Sandisk Cruzer 256MB and 512MB flash drives. These cards have a VIA chipset, and drivers are available on VIA's website. Good luck.

Links: http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php

http://toastytech.com/files/cruzerwin95.html

USB support for DOS (I have not tried this yet): http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/203.html

In case it wasn't mentioned, MS Dos contained a utility called interlink, which could help you.

I'm with 5u3 on this one. Get an old 3Com NIC... 3c509 for ISA or 3c905 for PCI. You can't go wrong. You can even get DOS SMB clients to work so you can transfer files to/from your shared folders on XP/Vista/Win7

I've been using 2.88 meg floppies to transfer data across.

Ofcourse it's only double that of normal floppy drives and it's not easy getting enough parts for just an extra 1.5 meg transfer space.
If I ever needed to transfer more I think I'd either use a zip drive (which I got enough spare parts for) or just use a slave IDE drive to transfer stuff from PC to PC.

Any ethernet ISA card for IPX + Magelink never failed for me for transfering files directly. Magelink is a DOS program though however it works beautifully with DOSBox Megabuild with IPX passthrough 😀

I took the easy way out... Windows for Workgroups.

Don't hurt me!

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

New IDE-USB adapters don't like old HDDs and old 386s don't like new HDDs...

how about old IDE-USB adapters?
is the usb-ideonly (nosata) enough?

there's nothing simpler than laplink5 (ll5.exe) and a serial cable connecting two 386/486 computers to xfer your files.

virtually no settings and nothing to configure. plug it in and go.

mTCP ftp server was the solution for me. All you need is an ISA NIC and transfers are no longer something to worry about... 😀

I swear by using 3.5" and 5.25" SATA HDD bays / caddies. Just pull em out and insert them into a dock on the desktop 😀

It does require a PCI SATA controller card though. But that's not an issue if you build a fancy MS-DOS Time-Machine!

mTCP sounds awesome I must say. Using a newer CD drive and simply erasable CDs (CDRW) also works quite well.

Back in the mid 90's I acquired 6 Iomega 90 MB Bournelli SCSI drives and their disks from a school that was just throwing them out. To this day I use them in my 8088 to 486 machines for transfering files and I have one of them in a Win2k machine I purpose built as my "universal file accumulator machine" which also has a 5.25 floppy drive, LS-120 floppy drive, a CD burner, DVD burner, and of course functions with USB drives and is easily accessible on my home network. In all this time I've only ever had one of the 6 Bournelli disks die, the other 5 still work fine.