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It's a computer with Windows 3.1, and I don't have a mouse for it, only a keyboard. It has a diskette and cd opening, but I don't know if they can burn things. Also, there's no USB entrance.

Is there a way in which I can recover the data?

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You may not have too terrible a time reading the bits and bytes off of the drive, but what program do you into to use to read the data in a usable format? – afrazier Dec 29 '10 at 18:52

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up vote 6 down vote accepted

Take the hard drive out, find a USB - > IDE adapter (they are about $10-20 all over the place, usually with SATA, PATA (2.5" and 3.5") in one small device, very useful!)

Then plug it into any reasonable machine and copy the data off.

Filesystem will be FAT or FAT32 which Macs and Windows machines can all read fine today.

Should be a piece of cake.

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+1 Quick and easy solution. The adapters are indeed very handy! – Dave M Dec 29 '10 at 17:45
Having a bit of a problem removing the hard drive... Also had to open it using a chistle and hammer (wow...), but I'll get it. Thanks :D – DarkLightA Dec 29 '10 at 18:08
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There's a slim, but non-zero chance that a system that old doesn't have a standard IDE drive in it. Even if it does, it might need to be directly hooked to a motherboard so that the C/H/S settings can be entered into a PC's BIOS because the drive may not support LBA. – afrazier Dec 29 '10 at 18:50
@afrazier Very true! I am curious how a USB-ATA adapter would handle that. – geoffc Dec 30 '10 at 2:25

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