1. Hello! You are currently viewing our community as a guest. Register today and apply to be a member of one of the longest standing gaming communities around. Once you have registered learn about our team and how to apply!

any help with parallel port file transfering ?

Discussion in 'General Open/Public Discussion' started by Doomhawk, 27 Mar 2008.


  1. Doomhawk

    Doomhawk Council of Elders<BR>UberPigeon Elder DragonWolf

    Im not sure if anyone can help with this or not considering this stuffs about 10 years old but figure Ill try. Im generaly pretty good with pcs, but when it comes to networking im usualy totaly lost :p

    Anyways at work we have this ancient pc thats a 386 dx something (it has a sticky note taped over it im to lazy to pick off) It has dos 6.2 and winblows 3.1, oh and roughly 2000 cad drawings on it from the last 15 years or so..

    Now I thought things would be simple and I could just do a little hard drive swap, but it seems to be proprietary and plugged into a giant riser card from the mobo. I tried swapping it just for the hell of it, didnt show up on the other pc and I realy dont feel like spending 3 days transfering files with floppys (already did that once about 6 months ago fun fun)

    Soo this other pc heres pretty old as well, but it has windows xp, so im wondering if theres any easy / reliable way to transfer files between the two with those OSs using a parralell cable ?

    Ive read you need a certian type of cable that allows transfering like that, but would there be anything built into dos/winblows that allows you to do that, or do I need to look for some kind of software as well ?
     
  2. Hamma

    Hamma Commanding Officer Officer

    Officer
    I believe what you need is called a null modem cable. I used to use one to play doom with a friend on another computer :lol:

    I do know it is possible to transfer in this way but I wouldn't even know how to begin. I'm sure there is built in software for it but you are going to be spending a shit load of time figuring out how to make it work and it isn't done in a standard manner we are used to today.

    Sounds like its a SCSI drive or something attached to an expansion scsi card. Was that even before PCI slots?

    You have a slew of problems to overcome there.. no USB (even if there was, Windows 3.1 wouldn't know whether to shit or go blind when it saw it) damn thing certainly won't run Windows in any form later than that.. you might be able to squeeze windows 95 on it.

    The first thing I would try would be to put a network card in it and share out the folders.. I think windows for workgroups 3.11 allows this, however you may not even be able to find a ISA network card.

    The other option would be to install an IDE hard drive in the old system and drag the drawings from the existing drive to the new one. There should at least be the basic IDE controller on the mobo for using an HD even if it i has a SCSI controller.
     
  3. Doomhawk

    Doomhawk Council of Elders<BR>UberPigeon Elder DragonWolf

    Yea this thing only has some ISA and VL buss slots for system boards and no PCIs lol. I just shut it down and took another look, and your right the HD controller is plugged into an ISA (I thought it was on one of the VL buss slots at first glance) but I dont want to even begin trying to figure out if I can transfer that to another PC lol.

    Theres only one pysical IDE connector on that board, but the ribbon does have 2, ill try an old HD on it and see if it recognizes it at all.

    I also just remembered I used to have an old Iomega zip drive with a parrallel connection, wonder if I can find one of those around somewhere, im pretty sure I used to use that on my old 486 with win 3.1.
     
  4. Hamma

    Hamma Commanding Officer Officer

    Officer
    Yep that would work as well, if you can find an old 3.1 driver - there should be some floating around the internet.
     
  5. symen

    symen DragonWolf

    I have a couple of old parallel port zip drives around if you want one.
     
  6. Doomhawk

    Doomhawk Council of Elders<BR>UberPigeon Elder DragonWolf

    Oh yea, my boss is back from vacation.. Talked to him today, he was going to have me try and find a used one. I think I saw some on amazon used or new anywhere between $30-70 if I recall. If you want to double check and have a simmiliar offer on one either post or PM me. Do you have paypall and a disk to go along with one btw ?
     
  7. symen

    symen DragonWolf

    I don't have a driver disk for one of those, I've only ever used them under Linux. Check around the net, you might be able to find one. As far as the cost, you can have it for whatever it costs to ship, I'm not interested in making any money on a fifteen-year-old device.

    I don't have paypal. Let me know if/how you want to proceed...
     
  8. The hard drive can't be that big, I'd still use floppies :p

    Get pkzip command line then use it to zip em and split em over floppy disks :D

    Of course...that would mean having a more modern computer that has a floppy drive.

    But I've used the cross over serial cable (null modem) to do transfers before. Works like a charm. I'm pretty sure there was some built in windows software to do it.

    Then again, that was probably over 10 years ago and I don't remember what the hell I did.
     
  9. Doomhawk

    Doomhawk Council of Elders<BR>UberPigeon Elder DragonWolf

    The pc can only format and use 700 or so kb disk to begin with, and its just painfully slow. Takes a good 15-20 seconds just to transfer a little 100kb .dxf file. It even has a big sticky note on it not to excede 600,000 byte files on the PC or they become corupt lol. Id try the cable transfer thing, but I realy want to spend 3-4 days figuring out how to make it work :p Symen has a drive on the way though so should be good to go soon :) Assuming the PC holds out that long, my hillbilly dad was spraying down the PSU fan with oil yesterday lol.
     

Share This Page