alt Hacker NewsMany years ago (want to say ~2010-ish timeframe), I needed to get data off of an old Pentium machine at my mom's house.
My first thought was to just pop out the hard drive, put it in an USB HD enclosure and Linux would automagically detect everything.
Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive. My next thought was to see if it would boot and it did! (Windows 98 IIRC)
But then the next problem: how to get data off of the machine? It had an ethernet port but no wifi.
So I did the following:
- Plugged in an ethernet cable
- Opened the browser (IE 4!)
- Downloaded putty and the putty scp binary
- scp'ed the data from the box to a Linux box
- Success!
It really is wild how older technology can still work nowadays.
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My evening hobby this week is getting my old Rock Band Wii instruments working on Linux. Got inspired by seeing a Linux 7 headline that the CRKD guitar is supported.
There's a whole kernel module that exposes all the Wiimote accessories (inc. plastic instruments) as gamepads. It's still shipping in SteamOS today.
>Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive.
That's not how things work. If you're using a USB adapter then Linux isn't failing to detect the drive, the adapter is failing to detect the drive. Also I'm pretty sure Linux still supports IDE, not that it matters in this case.