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SyQuest made portable hard drive diskettes. I believe they have been out of business going on a couple of decades. At any rate I have some disks and the hardware, but I am unable to find drivers. I would really like to get at the data I have on these disks (Some old pictures). Unfortunately I keep hitting dead ends trying to find drivers.

So were can I find drivers for a modern Windows OS, or what could be other alternatives?

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    Would running an older OS (one for which drivers are available) in a virtual machine be an option? You could then get the files into the virtual machine, and then grab the files from the VM (most VM hypervisors will allow you to "mount" the virtual disk image in a modern OS and access the files).
    – KenD
    Sep 25, 2016 at 13:13
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    Many SyQuest drives were SCSI or IDE, which should make them pretty much plug and play with Windows 10 and most other OSes. The parallel port version would require a driver. If you have that version, it may be easier to acquire a SCSI or IDE version that takes the same cartridge type.
    – Tim Locke
    Sep 25, 2016 at 14:14
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    I have a SyQuest drive in my Windows 98 box, and it is indeed a SCSI connection. If your drive is SCSI, then the only drivers required for windows should be the drivers for your SCSI card, not the SyJet. I suspect the same holds true for IDE (if they made an IDE version?). I don't think newer boxes even have a parallel port anymore, so that is going to be more problematic.
    – Geo...
    Sep 25, 2016 at 16:41
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    You can easily add a PCI parallel port card to modern PCs though, if that turns out to be what you need to hook it up.
    – mnem
    Sep 26, 2016 at 3:41
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    As you say, i understand that you are not trying to use this drive on windows 10, you are only interested in retrieving data on old disks. If this is true, I strongly suggest that you put the model of your drive , it will help a lot. Also, a driver specifically made for Windows 10 may be not needed at all, depending on the interface of your device. I suggest that you change your question to something like "How to read data from Seaquest model xxxx on a laptop/desktop with Windows 10".
    – flavio
    Oct 30, 2016 at 0:35

1 Answer 1

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Your best bet to rescue this data, in my opinion, will be to use the Linux operating system. It supports older hardware extremely well compared to most operating systems.

If you know what you are doing, you can install Linux on a Windows system and select which operating system to use at boot, and there are also live DVDs (which can also be installed on flash drives) which you can use to boot a temporary Linux system.

Once in Linux, you'll read the data and move it to another device - for example, a USB flash drive (separate from the boot flash drive if you used one to boot Linux) - and then read that device when you boot back into Windows.

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