★ Rescuing data from my IBM ThinkPad 755CE

Some time ago, my dad brought me some of my old stuff that’s been bothering him back at our family home. It seems storing some of my things in this big place really is to much, so now I get something brought back every other visit.

Anyway, one time I got this old laptop briefcase and it had the Thinkpad Laptop that I had been using as my main machine around the turn of the century. It’s an IBM ThinkPad 755 CE that I bought used from my uncle Michael, who got it as his work machine during his time at IBM, so it had a lot of stuff like a docking station, mouse, PCMCIA Ethernet and modem cards (which I remember purchasing myself).

When I got it back a few weeks ago, I figured I’d boot it up and look around for whatever I had left on there. I’m very much a data hoarder, so the thought of doing some file archaeology on myself turned me on somewhat.

The Laptop did boot up, but couldn’t get to the Windows 95 desktop for whatever reason. I gave up.

In the back of my mind, the thought of unsalvaged personal data kept gnawing though. I figured I’d attach the hard drive to my Mac and copy the files I found by hand. Got out the drive, which was amazing because the machine is so modular and servicable it’s unconceivable in the modern day. The 2.5″ IDE drive was in a plastic caddy, with protective stickers and everything. Carefully took it apart and detached the proprietary IDE-to-whatever adapter it had on it. Ordered the cheapest USB 2.0 adapter I found on Amazon.

Today I put everything together and made images of the two partitions (lol) on the 1.4GB drive with Disk Utility. Took about 10 minutes total. Drive didn’t die, all data copied, great success!

I did a tiny bit of spelunking, too, and found some real gems in there. The oelna.de website from about 1999. A single MP3 file. My entire AOL Instant Messenger chat history! School papers in .doc format. Files in my proprietary .tx2 format (which is a renamed .txt file). I’ll see if I can declassify more embarrassing findings in the future, but I’ll leave it at that for today. I’m thinking of a FBI-Epstein-file release cycle, a few at a time, slowly peeling back the curtains and revealing ever more horrendous teenage angst. Stay safe out there!