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Dos backup

D

DIRTsquirt

Senior member
I have a machine that is 6yrs old.. it has software installed that is critical to the operation of said piece of equipment.
Specs.
5x86 133 amd proc
2 gig hardrive
dos 5.0
Small drives that the mother board support arent available any more .. can i use a new 20 gig. and partition only 2 gig and leave the rest .. without using some sort of bios overlay?
/
How do i make an exact duplicate of the existing harddrive to be stored away for when this one finaly dies?
Will Xcopy work

any suggestions or assistance would be appreciated
 
ok one question at a time..
can i use a 20 gig harddrive to replace a 2 gig hardrive on a vintage machine..
what procedure would i use to deal with the 2.1 gig cap on the bios....
I dont need the full 20 gig 2gig will do nicely
 
It's highly doubtful that a board of that vintage will see a 20 gig without some fooling around. Some drives had jumpers to limit the size to 2 gig, which should work. That board should see an 8.4 gig, and if you put a 20 in it might see it as that. While there may be a bios limit of 2.1 gig, the real reason for the 2 gig limit is the operating system. Dos fat 16 partitions can only be up to 2.0 gig.

You might head over to the for sale forum and post that you are looking for some smaller drives. You could probably pick up enough to stock ahead.

While xcopy, used with the right switches, would copy everything over, it would not get the system boot files in the right spot. You need to make a few bootable floppies to have as backup. Running the command "sys a:" (no quotes) from a command prompt on the computer, will get the floppy to boot. Then you need to copy some files from the dos folder to be able to set a new drive up later. Grab fdisk.exe, sys.com, label.exe, format.com, attrib.exe, and xcopy.exe, and copy them to the floppy. Then if you have to get a drive to a bootable state you can boot from the floppy and type "sys c:"

Ghost, drive image, acronis, or 7tools should all be able to make exact copies of the drive, and get the system files in the right spot.
 
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