Howdy guys,

I don't ever post on this board, so I'm not sure if this is something y'all can help with. Not real sure who to ask about this.

After she retired, my grandmother got really into Genealogy. I remember her telling me in high school before she died that she had traced my mother's side back to Irish Kings in the 6th century or something. After she died her computer sat in the den at her old house for several years before being put into a shed outside. I don't know why. The shed was not climate stable, but the computer was kept out of the reach of water. Just open to the humidity and weather changes of north Texas.

Any chance I would be able to recover the files? I know pretty much nothing about computers, but here are some pictures of it. Any help would be appreciated.









Feel free to mock my socks and sandals. I ran the Austin half marathon Sunday, and these make my feet and legs not hurt so much.

I think you have a pretty good shot at this. Is that a modem or NIC? Can't quite tell from the photo but, hopefully, that's a CD burner, that's your best bet I think.

I would open it up and give it a good cleaning before turning it on. Then get a PS2 mouse and keyboard, a VGA monitor, and fire that thing up. If you can't find any of those try your local Goodwill, I went in one a couple of weeks ago and was amazed at the old and relatively new computer stuff they had.

If it won't boot up, you're going to have to figure out what kind of hard drive it has.

I came in here expecting to see stacks of punch cards. Pfft, you got this.

Looks like your first pic shows a model E2U which would have been made by Acer.
The phone, keyboard, and mouse lines looked snipped.
The separate box looks like some type of expansion box with a parallel port connector. Not sure it would be useful for anything.

As has been suggested, I would open it up and see what type of hard drive it has and how it's connected.

I did a quick look and they shipped with a quantum fireball ex 6.4 gb ata 33 drive.
Should be straight forward to image externally. Don't know your location, I have a dock you could borrow in bcs. But it's not fancy and think cost around $25.
If you want to experiment in the original system I would debug with the drive disconnected to make sure first power up does not pow the caps in the power supply taking out the drive with it. Pretty common measure when doing forensics

Double post

By cleaning do you mean just can air everything out?

The original operating system should still work?

Once again I know nothing about computers. Should I just take it to shop instead?

Image externally?

I'm in austin, but thank you for the offer.

Just look to see if any critters may have got in there, spider webs and such could be a problem. Also, if the system had dust buildup before it was stored in the shed, that could have attracted moisture and caused corrosion. Good to give it a good looking over before trying to power it up.

Just to add, it's an IBM, those things were built like tanks.

I'll honestly be surprised if it doesn't boot if it was working when last shutdown.

If you look closely at the standalone box with the parallel ports, you can make out a model number: C4413A. The google machine tells me it's a 2x CD-R drive.

Yes image externally. Things like the clock battery will be dead, and possibly coroded. Also electrolytic capacitors in the power supply and on the mother board degrade and can pop when power is applied after many years. Also just because it won't boot does no mean the data is gone.
Just don't want to have the data be fine and you power up and power supply pops and wipes out the hard drive electronics.
It's an ibm but not really, it's an Acer with a ibm label plastered on it.

It means copy the data from the hard drive without actually looking at it in a computer screen I believe.

ntxVOL said:

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Just to add, it's an IBM, those things were built like tanks.

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It looks like computer is from the IBM 'deathstar' era, so the hard drive may have issues.

The computer looks like it's from a bit before the Deathstar hit, especially if that's a 6.something GB drive. From what I remember the ones that were problematic were 60-120s. I can't read a date anywhere but based on the HD size my guess is it's from late '98 or early '99.

I'll echo what others said about hooking up the hard drive to a modern computer with an external enclosure. The CMOS battery will be a huge roll of the dice on that thing but since it was stored in a shed I'd expect corrosion and leakage. My dad did something similar with a G3 PowerMac he used and the PRAM battery leaked out so the motherboard is shot. Mine is a few months older but stored indoors and it's still fine.

I've worked on countless computers from that era. If I really wanted to play around with it and run whatever software the information you're looking for was created in after mirroring the drive I'd look into an emulator. You may end up needing to do this to export the data into something more usable anyway.

That is probably the route I'm going to go. Thanks for the advice guys!

If your grandmother was like my mom, and since you mentioned this dates back to well over a decade ago, then its likely she was using a genealogy software suite that she purchased. If so, any of the data she compiled is in a proprietary format, so you would need that software if you were to try and load it anywhere else.

I had an uncle that did that, he had the data files but the SW was outdated and he could no longer access them.

Did a little research and found that most use one of a couple different file formats but put their own proprietary spin on it. I was able to write a quick and dirty program to get most of the information pretty easily. At least the most important stuff.

The old IBM Craptiva. We had one 25 years ago.

exitone said:

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If your grandmother was like my mom, and since you mentioned this dates back to well over a decade ago, then its likely she was using a genealogy software suite that she purchased. If so, any of the data she compiled is in a proprietary format, so you would need that software if you were to try and load it anywhere else.

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That's why I'd try to make a disk image fro the HD contents, then fire up an x86 emulator, boot into Win98, and export to a more standard format.