Recommendations for Migrating Vintage PC Files to Modern

[isiolia]

Some CF adapters are made to go into a 3.5" bay or even an expansion card slot to make swapping the card easier.

That said, looking into it more, 286 BIOSes probably only support up to 504MB drives, and earlier ones may not work right with CF adapters (or a lot of actual IDE HDDs for that matter). So it may be a bit more of a project ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHhEdgd7shk for instance).

[racketboy]

Yeah, you can rotate HDDs in and out. But you'll have two different installations of the OS though. Your IDE controller almost definitely supports a second HDD, and it shouldn't be too hard to set up a second HDD and keep the one you got in there. But if you want to simply rotate a single drive, then one of those hot swap bays would definitely give you a lot of convenience so you don't have to open the PC case every time you want to swap. You just need an empty drive bay.



Although it might be hard to use a CF card with a hot swap bay, unless you get the kind of hot swap bay that uses a caddie.

Cool. My 286 case (which I want to preserve for sentimental reasons) won’t really let me do the hot-swap bay, but yeah, that’s good to know.

Now since we’re not even talking about Windows, doing a pure copy of the drive should give me another bootable OS. It’s just DOS with GeoWorks shell that autoboots. I totally understand if you’ve never dealt with GeoWorks, but if you have a solid guess, that’s helpful

[Ziggy587]

Hmm, can you simply copy the contents of the HDD to the CF card and have that work? Or do you need to clone the drive, as in create a drive image of it and then write that image to the CF card?

If the BIOS doesn't support X size drives, you might be able to get away with creating a partition on the CF card on a modern computer. But if the BIOS wont play with the CF card adapter, then that's another story. I know SATA drives have a jumper to limit the size that the BIOS sees, so I would guess those card adapters (or at least some of them) would have some kind feature as well.

[Anapan]

I usually initialize the new storage hardware on the computer I'm going to use it on. I had problems partioning dos partitions on new operating systems and having the older system recognize it. Using Fdisk, I create the partitions, then I format the first partition using the /s command so the system files are coppied. I then copy the rest of the files from the old hard drive over.