Getting data off win95 to XP

[miskairal]

Hi all and thanks for taking the time to read this,

Friends of mine have finally bought a new pc with xp home installed.
Their old machine has windows95 installed. All their files are backed up
onto floppy disks but there is no floppy drive in the new pc. They have
no network card, no USB ports and no CD burner in their 95 machine.

If their old drive was to be installed as a slave in the XP machine,
temporarily, would XP be able to see the files on it?

Thanks
miskairal

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Yes, and that would be the easiest way to transfer them.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[jmatt]

If their old drive was to be installed as a slave in the XP machine,
temporarily, would XP be able to see the files on it?

Also, you may need to change the new drive to Master with Slave ( MS )
the slave goes in the middle of the cable in most cases or cable it in
it's own slot.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Hi all and thanks for taking the time to read this,

Friends of mine have finally bought a new pc with xp home installed.
Their old machine has windows95 installed. All their files are backed
up onto floppy disks but there is no floppy drive in the new pc. They
have no network card, no USB ports and no CD burner in their 95
machine.
If their old drive was to be installed as a slave in the XP machine,
temporarily, would XP be able to see the files on it?

Yes. Depending on how much there is to transfer, that may well be the best
choice.

Three other choices they might want to consider.

1. Buy a diskette drive (they are $15 or so) and install it in the new
machine.

2. E-mail the files to themselves from the old machine and read the mail on
the new.

3. Take the floppies to a friend who has both a diskette drive and a CD
burner and ask him to burn a CD or CDs.

But if there's a substantial amount to transfer, moving the Windows 95 drive
to the new machine (either temporarily or permanently) is probably the best
choice.

 

[miskairal]

Thanks everyone. I'm not sure how much there is to transfer. I have a
floppy drive in my pc with XPhome but I've never been able to get it to
work and keep forgetting about it seeing as I never use it. Even with
brand new floppy disks it tells me
"No ID address mark was found on the floppy disk".

Totally OT but may be of interest to you. It is currently -1.2°C (about
30F) here at 6.30am in Qld, Australia. That's pretty darn cold for us

Thanks again
Cheerio
miskairal

 

[Harry Ohrn MS MVP]

XP often has trouble reading floppies that were created on older version of
Windows. One work around is to install a 3 Mode floppy driver like this
http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqnk/us/download/18221.html

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Xp is not so good with floppies, it's very picky about hardware and if the
heads are even slightly misaligned the read will error out. Not the best
option for the transfer of files.

-1.2°C is a mild fall or spring morning around here, -20°C is the norm in
winter, and -42°C (or F, they are the same) is not unusual.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[miskairal]

Thanks for the info but I don't understand to what you have directed me.
It appears to be something for a laptop pc and on googling I can find no
reference to a similar thing for a desktop pc. I have tried using brand
new out of the box disks but even they don't work. I'm not all that
concerned about it as I never use it but it would be nice to know how to
fix the problem. It is always possible that the drive is faulty but it's
just not worth the effort to test it on another pc.

Thanks again.

 

[miskairal]

Well gee, I think I'll stop whinging about the temp then Are you in
Canada?

I've never trusted floppies. I will enourage my friend to buy a USB
drive. I use my USB drive for immediate backup and then burn a CD every
2 weeks or so depending on how much I want to back up. Poor old
floppies, they served their purpose once upon a time