[redsniper]

At work, we're trying to backup the hard drive from a really old DOS computer. XP and Knoppix can't recognize the filesystem. Any ideas?

[captain-custard]

have you tried putting it i an usb hard drive box this should work as it should be a fat file system


http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-57149_35_0.html

i found that with a quick google

[redsniper]

yeah, it's already hooked up by a ide to usb thing.

[Kosh]

You could use an older OS, barring that there's always virtual PC

[Uchuujinsan]

Check if the device is recognized as hardware, and what is the filesystem of it with diskpart in win xp.
If the filesystem is unknown, it probably is damaged. Win xp should recognize any dos filesystem.
Some linux recovery tools (via bootdisk) have also a broader variety of known filesystems, maybe try that out first if the filesystem is unknown in diskpart/volume manager

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Are you sure it's an IDE drive?  Can't remember what it was called but there was an older interface back in the days of the 286/386 systems. 

Is the disk compressed with some sort of software or was it formatted with some sort of driver enabled?  Anything over 32meg (there were other limits along the way) had to either be partitioned into smaller virtual drives or needed a special driver.  If it was formatted with that driver then that driver would need to be loaded to read it so you would need to boot off the hard drive and hope the driver is in config.sys. 

It could also be the drive type in BIOS.  LBA, Large, etc.  If it's not set to what it was when the drive was formatted it might not be able to read it. 

I'd suggest getting an old motherboard (P2 or earlier although early P3's should work) and seeing if the drive will boot with various BIOS settings. 

[Blue Lion]

I have to know what's on this drive that you need backed up.

Really old porn from when you were a kid?

[Flipside]

Might be FAT16 or older (The drives, not the content ), which would explain your problem, since I don't think newer Windows can read those formats.

[redsniper]

I have to know what's on this drive that you need backed up.

Really old porn from when you were a kid?

At work

Anyways, thanks for the advice guys, but someone else ended up handling it while I went elsewhere.

[Blue Lion]

Why you gotta ruin my joke

[Nuke]

when my grandpa was building computers i swore ever one had some kind of porn on it. these were all 286es and all had 4 or 16 color screens. rathr impressive actually, must have filled up an entire 5.25 floppy disk. i even found a 640k 3.5 with a short anal scene on it. pretty impressive considering the machines (and the fact that i was 13 at the time)

oh as for the drive i remember a lot of the older drives' parameters werent auto-recognized by the bios back then. they were usually printed on the label and had to be manually entered in the bios. its possible that your bios isnt recognizing it. im not even sure if its possible to set the parameters on modern bioses anymore. you might also want to check the jumpers, older drives didnt have cable selecting capabilities, so if your primary drive isnt mastered and the old drive isnt slaved,l you might have problems.

[Flipside]

LOL When I got my first modem, most of the Bulletin Boards were 'phone first' boards, so you had to call the guy who ran the board and let him know you were planning to log in. Obviously, most boards had 'private' download areas for people the Sysop knew well...

How we cheered when VGA first appeared

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I was cheering when Dell released their first Inspiron that had a Pentium 4 in it. That was eight years ago, when I was a bigger idiot.

[Mika]

I'm not sure, but could a program like SpinRite be useful?