Pls. Help! Event data extraction Siemens S-5 115U

Hello

I'm uninitiated in the world of PLCs; am working on a project which aims to extract data (specfically, machine stop-events based on sensor activations & their timestamps) from a Siemens S-5 115U PLC into a csv or MS excel/access file in order to perform analyses on machine failure.
An RS-232 serial port on the PLC is available for communication. Using this, we have STEP5-DOS installed on a laptop w/ RS-232 port which interfaces with the PLC.

I'm looking at 2 options at the moment:
(1) Using an OPC server on the software side and the PC's RS-232 serial port to interface with the PLC and get the required tags. Problem I have here is: (a) Will the existing PC-to-PLC serial communication work or do I need add. interface H/W? (b) How to know WHICH tags to collect in the OPC server?

(2) Access data files used with the STEP5-DOS directly and store into an csv/Access DB. Is this even possible? Can event data be captured automatically into readable files on a PC? Again, how to know what data to capture?

I'd appreciate any help.

Regards,
Farhad.

Option 1: no extra hardware is needed, at least not with the OPC-servers I've tried. Knowing which tags to collect in the OPC server is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE without basic knowledge of the program in the PLC. This in turn is almost impossible without at least some basic knowledge of PLC programming. Only option here is to find someone which complies to this criteria and ask for his/her help.

Option 2: impossible all the way.

Kind regards,