Rant...

[Riptide]

This really sucked. FYI, this is kind of a long rant on how stupid idiosyncracies can get in the way of a simple data transfer...

I went out to swap a user's PC yesterday and the following issues came up:

1) Copying her files to the novell file server wanted to take over 2 hours for 200meg. Unacceptable. I tried changing duplex, frame types, and link speeds on her NIC/IPX settings. Nothing helped with that.
2) I tried upgrading her novell client, which upgraded Winsock (it's 95b). That blew up TCP/IP, causing it to no longer ping. I ran ws2bakup and it still didn't work properly. TCP/IP was hosed. Novell wasn't working right. The network connectivity on the PC was pretty much hammered.
3) Brought the PC back to my desk. Thought about using my USB disc drive, no go, it's windows 95 which has horrible USB support.
4) Tried a parallel transfer w/PCAnywhere. The XP version which went on my machine didn't support the LPT port. I don't have the proper serial cable. Tried several. Total waste of time.
5) Tried to upgrade the PC to windows 98 so I could at least use my USB disc and get the damn files off of there. No go. Her version of 95 refused to allow an upgrade. Even Windows XP setup kept telling me the upgrade option was not available. I tried several different full version copies of 98SE and they all errored out, complaining that the PC couldn't be upgraded and I needed an actual "upgrade" copy instead of the full version. Yay... I didn't have that particular disc on hand.
6) Make a long story shorter, I found a utility on the web that did allow me to finally copy the data between the two via parallel. Using winzip on her PC I was able to get the long file names preserved and transferred the zip file instead of all the individual files. Finally, hours and much frustration later, success.

What a bunch of crap.

[Gator]

maybe you should have removed her hard drive and connected it to another machine running Win98, 2k, or XP and then you could have used your drive, or at least copied her files temporarily to the other hard drive ;)

[Riptide]

Problem being she's using a crappy old laptop so I couldn't just switch out the drive and plug it into a desktop without using a different sort of connector that I did not have access to...

[nVidi0t]

Iomega Zip drives are good for old PC > New PC data transfer. (Parallel Port)

[Riptide]

Originally posted by nVidi0t
Iomega Zip drives are good for old PC > New PC data transfer. (Parallel Port)

Now, that is one option I did not consider. I still would've had to burn iomegaware to a CD on my other machine. That, and I'm not sure they support 95 any longer. If so, it probably would've worked. I think we did have a spare 100meg drive sitting around somewhere. Would've taken 3 disks, but it probaby would've worked.

Either way you hack it the thing was being a serious pain in the a**. :)

[GlowStick]

Novell IPX

WTF why in the world would ya use that!!!!

use good standards like tcp.

[Riptide]

Because TCP was totally hosed on the machine... It was out of commission, forcing me to look at other options. Doesn't matter anyway, the IPX option failed as well.

The ZIP drive idea or a backpack CDRW (both of which might not work under 95) were the only other options I could've tried. I did manage to get the files transferred with a little parallel transfer utility I found on the web. Wish I had tried that first, but u know how hindsight is.

I wonder if netbeui would've worked? Is that dependent on TCP at all?