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

Bill-kun

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 2, 2020
Messages
697
Location
Michigan
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!
 
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.
 
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
 
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