I have information on Hard Drive A. I want it on Hard Drive B. Now I know that I could easily just copy/paste it over, network two computers, burn it onto a CD, save it to a floppy or USB stick...yeah I know all that crap. Problem is that Hard Drive A is running Windows 3.1 which means I can't. It's auto-master as it has no jumper settings and I of course have no fancy programs. How can I transfer the stuff over from Hard Drive A (40MB total) to Hard Drive B? And oh yeah, the files are too big for floppies.
Get HD A, put it into Windows 2000/XP/NT4 system (simply because they have access to ALL file systems that have ever been associated with windows AFAIK) then copy the files across from the directory on HD A to location C, which is wherever you damn well like. Bit of a software&operating systems one really...
You could try putting it into Win98 or ME, not sure it would work, they're usually a bit fussy about the file systems. Out of interest, which file system was windows 3.1? [edit] after a bit of it seems all Windows OS' will be able to read the FAT file system that windows 3.1 is generally put onto. So no worries there, provided you have an extra IDE cable and a windows OS that works. [/edit]
When you say that HD A is "auto-master as it has no jumper settings" what do you mean exactly? Is it on cable select? The reason I ask, is because in order for the approach that Krikkit is recommending, you would have to put HD A in as a slave drive. Which should work fine for most circumstances. My other question is....if you aren't running "2k/NT or whatever", what OS are you running? If it's a *nix OS then you'll have to do some more messing around to make sure you have all you need to access a non-ext2/ext3/reiserfs filesystem.
I'm assuming here that your target machine is 98/ME? If so they will both be running [different versions of] FAT(32), so IMHO it should work....
I had thought about suggesting zipping the files across multiple disks until I read this part: It would still work, but that's gonna be a lot of disks! Still...by the time you find a different approach, you probably could have already had the stuff moved over just from zipping across floppies.
Another alternative is to use Laplink or equivalent if you have access to the necessary EPP or USB cables....
why not just use a boot cd - and xcopy the files over? hell, if its a 98 box you could probably just drop to teh command prompt an do it.
So i guess we need a bit more info. Are you copying between computers? Are you intending to keep the HDA and HDB in the same computer, just moving to free space on HDA? Does HDB have an OS? If you are not keeping HDB in the same computer, what OS are you transfering to? If you are moving to another computer do you have serial/parallel ports (yeah i know slow, but...) on both?
If you can't put it on the same channel as HDB because of it being stuck on single drive setting or whatever, unplug your CD-ROM and plug HDA into that IDE cable. If HDB doesn't have an OS in it that can access both HDs, there are some linux distros that will run just fine off a floppy - with excellent hardware detection and some even with a GUI.
