Years ago I used a software called FastCopy that you can probably find it as
free download on the web. The DOS version was a small program on one
diskette.
Won't xcopy work with floppies? If I understand Lineman Duke correctly, he basically wants to back up one hard drive on floppies, and then restore the contents on another hard drive. I suppose the computer in question does not allow attaching two hard drives simultaneously. Maybe you will have to look for some backup software.
Ayep, I was thinking about some archiving software too, but couldn't remember which one spans over several floppies. Somewhere I have a set of 720K disks containing an ARJ archive with a pirate copy of XTree Gold, my favourite MS/DOS file manager of the day.
Yeah, well. Considering that it took at least 6-7 years from that I obtained the software until I owned my first PC compatible, it wasn't much of evaluation. Besides, by then DOS was no longer my first choice of operating system.
Enough off-topic. ARJ as suggested by Jorg should do the job quite well, and save a few floppies compared to any backup system without compression.
well i screwed up the hard drive its not formated and yes i can only hook up one drivei tried norton ghost but i ran out of disk lol (i stoped at 187) and ws hoping to find somthing that yuses less disk than the 218 it wanted
I never had the patience to try to use floppies to clone a hard drive.
I used to use a null modem cable and a DOS file transfer program called Brooklyn Bridge by Fifth Generation Systems. It was especially handy because you could put one machine into a mode where the entire transfer process could be controlled from the other.
Or, if the machine is on a network and you have an NFS server (like a Linux or BSD server) with a partition you can write to, you could use XFS and XCOPY to clone the drive contents. Once you've replaced the drive with a bigger one, just reverse the process to copy everything back.
also somthing i forgot to say is the drive is split up and compressed by drive space which has also caused a problem and i dont have space to expand it.