Best vintage program for whole-hard-drive imaging (PC compatible)

[Bill-kun]

I'd like to gain another skill in vintage computing: imaging and restoring a full vintage hard drive. I have several hard drives I'd like to image, but the two I want to start with are a Seagate ST-157-A (45 MB.) and a Seagate ST3283A (245 MB.).

I have a CF adaptor board on my 386 that is the target for storing the image files.

Please give advice/point to the best DOS programs for doing this. Thank you!

 

[kc8eyt]

Ghost, versions 5.0 and 7.0. I use these two all the time to image drives to CF cards, CF cards to drives, drives to drives, CF card to CF card, etc.. for 8088 to Pentium I systems. Later versions of Ghost are overkill unless you need multi-cast ghosting, ghosting to writable CDs, ghosting across network shares,etc.

These two versions will fit on a single 1.44MB bootable diskette.

 

[Al Kossow]

see http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?78073-imaging-a-whole-hard-disk-into-a-file
I ended up using DMDE http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthre...ole-hard-disk-into-a-file&p=648163#post648163

 

[kc8eyt]

see http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?78073-imaging-a-whole-hard-disk-into-a-file
I ended up using DMDE http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthre...ole-hard-disk-into-a-file&p=648163#post648163

According to that thread by default Norton Ghost creates logical disk images. I'll need to see if that is true for versions 5.0 and 7.0. These versions were from before the Norton buyout.

 

[jafir]

Later versions of Ghost require a 386 or better too. According to this version 4 requires a 286, so if running on a 8088, you'd need verion 3.x or earlier. I know I've tried version 8 on a 286 and it doesn't work, and gives an error asking for a 386.

At some point the image format changed as well. I think I used 2.something to backup an old hardcard in a OG Compaq Deskpro, and I could not open the file using the explorer from 8.0

 

[retrorage]

I am using DRIVEIMAGE XML ver 2.50, it is very easy and small software.