wrote in message ...
Just out of curiosity, is there any reason you can't either buy what
you're
asking for off-the-shelf in the form of, e.g., LapLink or else use an
interface that's better suited to the problem to begin with (such as
Ethernet
or even those USB "networking" cables)?

An even better solution would be to cobble the destination drive
into the source-drive's PC, do a big XCOPY, and uncobble it.
Unfortunately, in my situation the drives are NOT compatible, either.

Neither do the computers I'm working with have Ethernet or USB.

And there's almost a times-100 ratio in speed; to copy a 1 gig
disk via laplink will take about 24 HOURS vs about 17 MINUTES via
the parallel port.

Besides, there's always the fun of doing it, and that much time
difference should even "pay" for the programming effort.

At least one version of laplink that I remember used the printer port for
connecting.

Along a similar vein, there was talk in comp.os.cpm a couple of weeks ago
about a utility that allowed a dos machine to function as a disk drive for a
cp/m computer via the printer port, perhaps if you look that one up, you can
write a util that allows your machine to do the same. At least it should
help get you started.

In my opinion writing the utils to do it will take more than 24 hours, if
you start the copy now it might just be done before you finish writing the
utils.

Cross opsys transfers are done here the slow way with some form of xmodem or
zmodem at 19.2k, it may take a while but it works just fine while I am
asleep.