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USB card for Windows 95 laptop?

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racer914

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Joined
May 5, 2019
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11
Location
New York, USA
Hi,
I have a Toshiba 430 CDT that I'm trying to retrieve some files from. For media, it has only a non-writable CD player. It also has a serial port. It I thought a USB might be a convenient way to move files from this laptop. Other suggestions welcome!

I see there are drivers available to get USB to work on a Windows 95 machine, but no suggestions for hardware to use. I'm a bit weak on hardware tech, so pardon the noob questions here. Would I need to get a PCI USB card to take advantage of the USB drivers? Or can I somehow use an adapter from the serial port? Again, any suggestions welcome.

Thanks.
 
The simplest and cheapest solution would probably be Laplink software. You use a null modem cable between the laptop and another PC running the Laplink software to transfer files back and forth. Only downside is that it's slow, and you need a null modem cable, which are not common these days.

https://winworldpc.com/product/laplink/75-for-windows-95

If you wanted USB, you're going to have to find an ancient Cardbus USB 1.x card that has Windows 95 drivers, which are getting harder to find. You can get them for Windows 98SE, but they most likely won't work with 95.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/302251675512?epid=633113419&hash=item465f9a8f78:g:t1QAAOSwDkJfdGBn

But if you're going through all of that trouble, it would be best to just get a Cardbus Ethernet adapter. This one has drivers available for Windows 95OSR2:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/124901138502?hash=item1d14b02046:g:k9QAAOSwsZthQQGX

I have one of these cards and they're pretty good. It'd be a better option than USB, because Windows 95 has pretty crappy USB support.
 
Thanks very much gigabite - that's super helpful. One thing I realized I should have mentioned, My other computers are Windows 8 and Windows 10 machines (I also have a newer Mac for work). Would any of your suggestions be well (or not well) suited for communicating with Windows 8 or 10 machines? Thanks again!

Edit - I should mention that the Windows 10 machine as USB-A ports, and the Windows 8 machine has USB-A and and ethernet ports.
 
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Frankly the simplest thing to do would be to extract the hard disk from the old Toshiba and connect it to one of those external USB to PATA adapter dongles. Plug it into your more modern machine, copy the stuff off, done.
 
Neither the Laplink or USB options will really help you. The former requires another machine of similar vintage with a real serial port and Windows 9x to work. The latter USB is going to be a headache. USB was already a bolted on kludge to Windows 95, but flash drive required an additional driver on top of the USB host controller driver in order to support storage devices over USB.

Other headaches you'll run into with USB are flash drives failing to initialize from not recognizing ancient USB controllers. Speeds are going to be slow with USB 2.0 and painful on USB 1.x If you have large numbers of files to copy, it can literally take hours.

An Ethernet card would be your best bet. You'd be able to make a local area network with all of your computers and connect to the internet with your laptop. You wouldn't be able to do much on the modern web, but it would give you access to FTP, where you could make a simple FTP server on another machine to connect to and transfer files back and forth.

Due to the security crap of modern Windows, you wouldn't be able to do file/folder sharing easily or at all. I've heard of some people trying it with mixed success, but it opens a bunch of vulnerabilities on modern machines because you have to enable old insecure protocols. You may be able to work around it by installing Virtualbox and installing an old version of Windows on it, like 2000 or XP, which can still somewhat easily communicate with older Windows 9x machines.
 
I haven't experimented a lot with it, such as with the unpatched 95 "a" version, but I can access a file share with no password located on a Windows 95 OSR2.1+NTLM update machine from a Windows 10 machine with no problems. At least, I don't remember having to do anything fancy. Trying to go the other direction would be a headache. Using no password skips all the authentication compatibility headache.

Of course, only do that on a small firewalled LAN or direct connection.
 
Since its a laptop grab a Cardbus/PCMCIA to CF adapter, a CF card and a USB card reader. No network crap, no cables.
CF cards show up under Windows 95 as a generic disk drive and will appear as such under My Computer.
 
Just did a little more reading and ran across this ... imgburn to enable CD burning on older machines that don't have that feature.

My Win95 laptop has a working CD drive, but is only read. If I'm reading the link above correctly, imgburn would allow writing to a CD from my drive. I'm thinking that would be easy peasy and no or minimal cost as a bonus.
 
Imgburn is software. It will let you burn CD or DVD images, using the appropriate drive that can write, on an operating system that doesn't support it. It will not create the ability to write CD with a drive that does not have the hardware in it to do that. If your drive is not a CD-R or CR-RW drive, it will not burn a CD.
 
racer914 said:
My Win95 laptop has a working CD drive, but is only read. If I'm reading the link above correctly...
Click to expand...

You're not. (The second paragraph of the article is "For all these needs, your must have a capable recording device on your computer and, of course, a recording software installed on your computer.") No software can turn a plain CD-ROM drive into a CD burner.

(Old versions of Windows didn't *include* any support for using the burning capabilities of drives, you had to install "something". This article is proposing imgburn as a suitable something.)
 
NeXT said:
Since its a laptop grab a Cardbus/PCMCIA to CF adapter, a CF card and a USB card reader. No network crap, no cables.
CF cards show up under Windows 95 as a generic disk drive and will appear as such under My Computer.
Click to expand...

This may be the simplest idea short of just tearing out the hard disk and reading it directly. (And maybe it *is* the simplest, it depends on how hard it is to get the hard disk out of that particular Toshiba. From the pictures I googled it looks like this isn't one of those machines where you just unscrew one little thing and slide the HD out the side.) Here's the dingus you need, plus a CF memory card. There is a company selling a PCMCIA to SD adapter that I would hazard a guess would also work, but since it's sold labeled for a specific purpose I'm a little hesitant to recommend it. (It's *probably* just the equivalent of a PCMCIA-to-CF adapter with a CF-to-SD adapter stuck inside it, so if you already have a smallish SD card and a reader then maybe it's worth a shot.)

FWIW, according to this spec sheet the slots built into a 430CDT are only 5v PCMCIA, no CardBus. If that's actually true then USB is basically a nonstarter. The PCMCIA storage adapters above should work fine in normal 5v slots.

If you actually want to keep using the laptop then, sure, a network card is probably the "right" answer, but for a one-time data transfer you're potentially buying yourself a big pile of screwing around getting everything set up.
 
If your laptop has a parallel port, then an Adaptec MA348 or MA358 will give you a SCSI interface and then the sky's the limit.
That's how I loaded Win95 onto an old P1 laptop (no CD drive)--I used a SCSI CD drive with said MA348.

Another option would be a parallel port Zip, Jaz or Sparq drive.
 
SomeGuy said:
I haven't experimented a lot with it, such as with the unpatched 95 "a" version, but I can access a file share with no password located on a Windows 95 OSR2.1+NTLM update machine from a Windows 10 machine with no problems. At least, I don't remember having to do anything fancy. Trying to go the other direction would be a headache. Using no password skips all the authentication compatibility headache.

Of course, only do that on a small firewalled LAN or direct connection.
Click to expand...

Depends on what version of Windows 10. I think it requires SNMP v1 to communicate with anything older than Vista, which was disabled in a more recent version of Windows 10. I think it was 1903 or 1909. I think it's still possible to re-enable SNMP v1 on versions after that, but not entirely sure.

Microsoft has been gutting tons of legacy code from Windows 10 in recent versions like 20H2 and more than old networking support has suffered. I have a customer with an old parallel port plotter that worked fine until 1903 and then it wouldn't work at all. turns out that Microsoft axed some parallel port functionality that it required to work.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Depends on what version of Windows 10. I think it requires SNMP v1
Click to expand...

I assume you mean SMB. For my older systems I just use FTP. It would be nice if you could enable older versions of SMB on just one NIC, so that you could have your windows 10 secure on the "internet" side of things, and have a separate network for the older protocols.
 
If you're in the "buying things" mood - a Parallel Zip 100 drive for the laptop, and a USB ZIP250 for your modern rig.

That's how I do file transfers on 99% of my PC's - if it's got a parallel port, it'll do ZIP. And the USB 250 drive works great even on Windows 10
 
jafir said:
I assume you mean SMB. For my older systems I just use FTP. It would be nice if you could enable older versions of SMB on just one NIC, so that you could have your windows 10 secure on the "internet" side of things, and have a separate network for the older protocols.
Click to expand...

Both SMB and SNMPv1 are used on Windows 9x for networking services. I have a couple of XP era NAS units that wont work without SNMPv1 being enabled.
 
SNMP is a management protocol and has nothing to do with file transfer or sharing network drives.

A NAS may need it because it's, well, a NAS. It's not needed within a Windows network.

Speeds are going to be slow with USB 2.0 and painful on USB 1.x If you have large numbers of files to copy, it can literally take hours.
Click to expand...
Windows 95 does not even support USB 2.0. You should stay away from USB on anything prior Win98 SE + NUSB.

Not sure how large the files are you want to copy over from the laptop. But one option might also be to get a USB floppy drive for your modern systems. I assume the laptop has a 3.5" floppy disk drive..?
 
Thanks folks for all the suggestions and advice - again, really appreciate it.

So I got the first PCMCIA card that Eudimorphodon suggested in post #11. Initially I thought the laptop wasn't recognizing it, but it did once the CF card was inserted. Definitely an easy and pretty cheap way to get the files I want off the old laptop and onto my newer one.

I'm using the older laptop to run some aftermarket automotive programmable ECU software that is old enough that it doesn't run on anything newer than Win98 or maybe XP. I got a good deal on this Win95 laptop so I've been using that. I tried running the ECU software on dosbox on my newer laptop, but it didn't work out because the ECU firmware isn't USB compatible so I couldn't get it to talk to the new laptop. So the old laptop it is, using a serial cable to connect to the ECU. I'll retrieve files from the laptop periodically for backup and analysis, so the CF card is convenient. The hard drive on the 430 CDT is pretty easy to get to, but the CF card will be easier.
 
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I would never bother trying USB on Windows 95 unless you have specific period hardware which states it can work with it *and* you have the specific manufacturer drivers to go with it. USB just wasn't a consideration when 95 was released and was never good enough for general use. Simply installing the USB support patch might well get motherboard USB ports to be recognised in Device Manager but in many cases you'll struggle to get any further than that. Connecting a USB peripheral and have it just work wasn't really a reality until 98SE was released; you're definitely not going to be sticking any random USB memory stick in a Windows 95 machine and have anything meaningful happen. Also even if you can get your device to work pretty much all 9x era hardware will only support USB 1.1 which is slow as molasses anyway.

A parallel port ZIP drive and a copy of PalmZip (not that you need it in this case since you can use the Iomega drivers with Windows 95) combined with a USB ZIP drive to plug into your modern machine are excellent investments and easy ways of moving files between pretty much any old machine to any new one. It is going to be pretty slow and of course it's a two stage process but as long as time is not a factor it is a very reliable and very easy to set up yet very cheap solution.

If networking, you can easily connect your Windows 10 machine to a share on the Windows 95 machine and move files that way. Networking between the two is only a problem if trying to do it the other way around; Windows 95 can see shares on the newer machine but won't be able to supply credentials to connect to them. Allegedly it can be worked around but in years of trying I've never got it to work, especially when you can just connect in the other direction.
 
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