I wonder... is there any live mini iso of any distro that when you boot it, it's only terminal? And it must support literally ancient hardware. It's about a computer from early 90's which surprisingly enough still works and runs MS-DOS but for an uknown reason MS-DOS won't find the hard drive. The computer in question is from the era before AGP (I'm not even sure that thing has RAM, cuz I didn't see any where it was supposed to be) and the owner wants to save, if possible, some data from the hard drive before trashing it. The only way I see this going, is to find something like TinyCore but without desktop and only tty mode, similar to Arch when you boot from its ISO. AFAIK TinyCore is small but comes with desktops and I doubt that ancient video card of that computer can handle anything fancier than MS-DOS, no matter how much lightweight it is.
The computer has something that looks like USB, altough it's a mystery whether it will recognize any flash drive, but it also has an ancient CD reader, which, hopefully, will be able to read and load that terminal distro, if such a thing exists.
Personally I have very little hope of saving anything from that hard drive bc the CD-ROM can't burn discs and if it doesn't recognize any flash drive, the mission will be doomed, but the man wants me to try anyway.
I suppose I could try with Arch ISO but I'm not sure whether this CLI mode of Arch supports basic commands like "cp" (copy) or "blkid". Not to mention that the computer's file system is older than me and is probably not supported by Arch anymore.
If you have other ideas how to get the data from the hard drive, throw them my way. My computer doesn't have power and data connectors like this computer, so I can't attach the hard drive to my own computer.
The computer has something that looks like USB, altough it's a mystery whether it will recognize any flash drive, but it also has an ancient CD reader, which, hopefully, will be able to read and load that terminal distro, if such a thing exists.
Personally I have very little hope of saving anything from that hard drive bc the CD-ROM can't burn discs and if it doesn't recognize any flash drive, the mission will be doomed, but the man wants me to try anyway.
I suppose I could try with Arch ISO but I'm not sure whether this CLI mode of Arch supports basic commands like "cp" (copy) or "blkid". Not to mention that the computer's file system is older than me and is probably not supported by Arch anymore.
If you have other ideas how to get the data from the hard drive, throw them my way. My computer doesn't have power and data connectors like this computer, so I can't attach the hard drive to my own computer.