What could possibly go wrong? Win 98, IDE drives, 4 TB USB drive

So a friend recently asked me, his "computer guru," to copy the contents of 4 IDE drives to an external HDD which he could read on his laptop. "Sure, why not?" I said. "I even have this really, really old Win XP system in the garage."

This old Win XP system reads IDE drives. It's a homebuilt based on an ASUS A7M-266D, with dual AMD Athlon CPUs that have been "pencil modified" to run in MP mode, with 256 MB RAM. Like 20 years ago, it was my main desktop.

That was a long time ago. I'd forgotten a lot.

IDE drives are "master" or "slave." I had forgotten all about master and slave drives. I needed to change jumper settings to make the drives slave rather than master. Of course, the drives are all from different manufacturers, so the jumper settings are each different.

Win XP is ancient, really ancient, compared with Windows 10. For some reason, I will have to reconfigure the Workgroup settings, even though I'm sure I had them set before. I have completely forgotten how to do that, so I'll need to do a web search.

I tried to install a 32 bit version of Macium. Didn't install properly. After installation, it kept on throwing off error messages. And I uninstalled Reflect, and then then the error messages stopped. So no imaging. All I can do is copy the entire filesystem of each drive to an external drive.

That external drive is 4 TB. I spent well over 1 hour of trying different external cases for that 4 TB drive, and none of which were recognized by Win XP. Then, then, I remembered that Win XP can't read GPT drives. Duuh. So I converted the drive to MBR. Then I got reminded that MBR drives can't read past 2.2 TB. Probably not an issue for me, but another time-waster.

So far I've done 2 of the 4 drives, but without searching for deleted files. I'm going to try a program off Hiren's Boot CD for x86, but I'm not optimistic here.

And no hot plugging. For each of those 4 drives, I need to power down the system, connect up the new drive, and then reboot. And XP is slow, slow to boot up.

Of course, this old system doesn't do WiFi. So I had to dig up a long Ethernet cable from my parts in in my garage, and run the cable into my router.

Tomorrow is another day, and I wonder what new surprises I will have.

Just a comment:

I tried to install a 32 bit version of Macium. Didn't install properly. After installation, it kept on throwing off error messages. And I uninstalled Reflect, and then then the error messages stopped. So no imaging. All I can do is copy the entire filesystem of each drive to an external drive.

If you really wanted to use this, you could create its bootable disk, and boot the PC from that.
No need to install MR.

dalchina said:

Just a comment:


If you really wanted to use this, you could create its bootable disk, and boot the PC from that.
No need to install MR.

Sounds good. I'll try that.

x509 said:

So a friend recently asked me, his "computer guru," to copy the contents of 4 IDE drives to an external HDD which he could read on his laptop. "Sure, why not?" I said. "I even have this really, really old Win XP system in the garage."....

I only had the one IDE drive I needed to copy - the last remaining working part from my old XP laptop.

By far the simplest way is to use an IDE to usb adapter, then you can read the drive(s) on your modern system as an external drive. Something like this....

Amazon.com search: Ide To Usb Adapter

I used mine to make a Macrium image of the old XP system drive, then I could restore it to a VM and boot it up....

dalchina said:

Just a comment:


If you really wanted to use this, you could create its bootable disk, and boot the PC from that.
No need to install MR.

I thought this was a good idea, and then I remembered that this old system has a BIOS from about 1999, with no USB support. You need to get USB support from Windows.

So for a keyboard/mouse, I have this ancient IBM keyboard with the classic red "pointer button" and mouse buttons. It has PS/2 connectors, which do work at the BIOS level if/when BIOS changes are needed. Fortunately once Windows boots up I can use a USB mouse.

bratkinson said:

This will not be an easy file transfer task. There's multiple issues involved.

No kidding!

For starters, XP can't handle drives bigger than (I can't remember the exact size) 8GB/16GB/32GB, something like that. So plugging in a 4TB drive in an external USB tray won't work. At best, XP will treat it (if you format it under XP) as a single drive of whatever the XP maximum capacity is. Additionally, XP never 'heard of' GPT partitioning (vs MBR). So formatting the 4TB as GPT will likely confuse XP to the point that it will think it is an unformatted drive. And formatting it as MBR, Win 10 will not 'see' beyond whatever the drive size limitation is for MBR drives. Also...you'll need a device driver for XP for your external USB drive tray. If it's newer than, say, 2010, there probably aren't any out there.

Actually, once I formatted the external drive as MBR and created a 2 TB partition, there were no issues.

Well, not exactly. I'm not sure if this is a BIOS issue or a Windows issue, but that external drive is recognized only if the system was powered down. A Windows restart didn't work.

And yes, the master/slave games can be problematic. Thankfully, every IDE drive I've ever dealt with (about 100, give or take) had jumper-setting diagrams on top to show which settings do what. I vaguely recall, too, that some motherboards require the master IDE drive be the closest to the motherboard connection...ie...the center connector of the 3 connector cable.

What do you know. One of the Maxtor drives did NOT have that jumper-setting diagram. But, amazing, or maybe not so amazing, manualslib.com had the manual for that drive, including the jumper settings.

Given that your ASUS mobo has 2 IDE connectors on it, with an extra IDE cable, you can use that secondary connector to handle drives 2 & 3. In all liklihood, you already have a CD drive connected in one of the IDE positions. To get all 3 'stranger' drives plus your original bootable IDE drive in your computer, the CD drive will have to be temporarily disconnected. There's no need to physically remove the CD drive from your computer. It only needs to be disconnected. I've long lost count of how many times I've put HDs on top of a cardboard box to bring it to the right height to easily connect it to whatever mobo I had at the time. As it/they are physically outside of the computer, there's enough room ventillation to keep them within normal operating temperature range.

I'm sure there was a CD drive on this system once. No longer.

But I still managed. My routine was to set each of the 4 IDE drives to slave, plug it in to the data and power cables, and then boot up the system. Doing a full copy to the external drive, even at USB 2 speeds, took 1-3 hours per drive. Then I would shut down the system, and repeat the process.
Once I cracked the code on all the issues, this process went smoothly.

For what it's worth, I used to have 2 XP boxes...one for 'real' and the other was my 'test box'. I'd drop in drives, or whatever, test this, combo, mobo, as well as to recover what I could from damaged drives of my friends. When I moved to Win 7, the test box got set aside, and not reused for a couple years when I put in a AMD quad processor system with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD in it for a friend.

So...what's the solution?

Knowing that XP can't hack 4TB in or out of the box, to me, the best solution is to network the XP box with your Win 10 computer and put the 4TB connected via USB to that. FWIW, my main XP box still gets powered up a couple times per month for software that doesn't exist in the Win 10 environment and couldn't be 'tricked' to run in Win 10, either. But the XP box is connected to my main computer via wired LAN. Even if there are/were wireless connections in the XP days, they'd be incredibly slow speeds. Hopefully what's in the XP box is a 10/100 LAN card.

Yes the XP box does have a 10/100 LAN card, but it seemed easier to just copy off all the files on a drive to that external USB drive.

So... Using the network, (with appropriate read permissions in the XP box for your Win 10 box/user), on your Win 10 box, copy one HD at a time to the 4TB. Don't expect it to run any faster than 2 hours or more to transfer 1 IDE drive worth of data to the 4TB. I'd also suggest that you put each IDE drives' data into separate folders on the 4TB, just in case there's some duplicate file names/folders between the IDE drives.

Good luck! It'll be a good way to spend an afternoon or more waiting and waiting for the drive copy activity to complete.

I did have a separate top-level folder for each of the 4 IDE drives.

Almost forgot...
If the XP box has been sitting for a long time (years?), it's possible the boot drive may have siezed due to the lubricating grease getting too old. Some years back, I bought an older, unopened, brand new in static blocking bag 2 TB hard drive (WD Green)...try as I may, I couldn't get it to spin up! I even put it in my oven at 120 for a couple hours thinking that would work, but it didn't. You may run into the same problem with your XP computer or any of the drives to be copied.

Fortunately not. The newest files that I could see with a quick search of the root directory were dated 2016-2018. Hard to believe, since these systems were all running Windows 98. But, hey, whom am I to judge?

It just dawned on me...did they ever make an external usb-connected tray/backup enclosure for IDE drives? If so, plug that into your Win 10 box as well as the 4TB via USB. Saves screwing around with the old XP box.

Actually I think that at one time I had an IDE to SATA connector module. But I couldn't find it in my parts bin. So I took this approach. For specific reasons, I had to get this copy job done as fast as possible, no time to order one of these adapters from Amazon.

NavyLCDR said:

Like @Bree stated, if it was me I would just get an IDE to USB adapter and use a modern computer with Windows 10 or 11. There is an excellent program for copying large amounts of files called FreeFile Sync:
FreeFileSync: Open Source File Synchronization & Backup Software

Totally agree, IF I had enough time get get this adapter ordered and delivered, and still finish within the schedule (which I don't control). I just hope there never is a next timer.

I use Goodsync, and I'm quite happy with it.