Oldschool system needs some form of backup!

[ame540]

I hope someone can answer my question. We need to time warp for a second here.

We have some optical lathes (they cut contact lenses) in our lab at work here. They program the use runs in DOS, but the system is an older ATX style case that has a serial connection among other things. How can i back these "workstations" up?

My boss wants me to be able to copy all the files on the hard drive to an external HD. I dont know if this is possible. In some of them i do see an open hookup on the primary IDE cable (probably a slave) if that helps at all.

Thanks. I'm stumped.

-Aaron

 

[edfair]

Probably would be better to get another machine with multiple HD (primary and secondary) slots available and use ghost to copy them across onto a fresh drive with the destination on the primary and the source on the secondary.
Ghost is a DOS based drive to drive duplicator when used in this application.
Finding roughly comparable drives may be a problem.
It is personal preference, but I would rather risk dropping a drive than having to change things around on a production machine.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[jlshelton]

Some other options:
Install (or replace) the optical drive with a CD-ROM drive, and get software that runs under DOS.

Install a removable drive bay (see CyberGuys.com, others) that lets you put in a disk drive, and remove it without tools. When installed, use DOS to copy critical files from the main drive to the removable. You say there may be a slave port on the IDE cable, so that could hook up to the removeable drive tray.

Look on eBay or otherwise for old-style parallel port disk drives. They were made, in the early '90s, for hooking to the computers of the day. The early Iomega Zip drives had a parallel port on them, for example.

Copy data to floppies; you probalby don't have that much data if you are running DOS. If there's no floppy drive, you should be able to install one without problem, $15 bucks max for a drive, and DOS will recognize it, typically as A: drive.

 

[Sympology]

Put ethernet cards. Connect them to a hub and use ghost to clone them to a pc with a decent size hdd drive. If the pc has say xp set up create some shares on it, map a drive in dos and clone away.

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[zeitghost]

Laplink?

 

[ame540]

I think floppies arent going to work, as old as these things are, there is quite a bit of data on the HD.

ahhhh yes ethernet cards. Some of the lathe computers have PCI Nics. Sadly i dont know much about DOS networking, so i would need to look into learning how to get , say an XP laptop to recognize a DOS drive over an ethernet connection?

Removable tray HDs... ive used these systems before, theyre pretty cool. Not a half bad idea. I wil need to check what kind of Primary HD's are in these machines but i dont think its anything ancient. Looked just like regular 5400 RPM IDE drives, but i could be mistaken, i will have to check.

too bad i cant just use a USB flash drive!!!

thanks for all the excellent suggestions. If someone could point me to some help regarding DOS networking that would be helpful too. Thanks!

 

[edfair]

One way is Lantastic. DOS version and XP version talk to each other. The problem may lie in drivers for the NICs.
The external ZIP was a good idea if the machines have a parallel port available.
Laplink is also good if you can find common interchange ports. But finding older versions might be a problem.

I use all 3 methods at one time or another.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.