• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

How can I create a restore CD?

K

Ken Vaughn

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 16, 2010
Messages
138
Location
Colorado, USA
I picked up an IBM Aptiva E-240 today at a thrift shop. It was marked $10 but I got a senior discount of 50%. Total cost $5. I bought it because it will give me a Windows machine which will also boot to DOS.

AMD K6-2, 64MB Ram, 6 GB HD, Windows 98. Perfect condition -- not a scratch. The previous owner appears to have scrubbed the disk and performed a factory restore (initial load), but the recovery CD was not included with the system. Is there a way I can save the current state of the system to a USB flash drive and create a recovery CD on another system? I have a driver which will allow me to access a USB flash drive under Windows 98.
 
AFAIK Ghost is still a current commercial product; if you're looking for a pretty good free version, check out Seagate's DiscWizard (a version of Acronis' excellent program); if necessary there are hints out there about how to bypass the Seagate/Maxtor restriction.
 
While Ghost is still a commercial product, you can buy used copies of previous versions cheaply on Amazon. Just search on previous versions, verify that it includes the old DOS version (Ghost 2003 did), and buy whatever version will do the job most cheaply. I think I paid $15 for a copy of Ghost 2003 when I needed one.

You can get by with a very old version of Ghost, since cloning Win9x and DOS is much less complicated than Windows 2000 and newer. No having to worry about duplicate SIDs and stuff.
 
There's an open source project called g4u which essentially does the same thing as Ghost.
 
Dave Farquhar said:
While Ghost is still a commercial product, you can buy used copies of previous versions cheaply on Amazon. Just search on previous versions, verify that it includes the old DOS version (Ghost 2003 did), and buy whatever version will do the job most cheaply. I think I paid $15 for a copy of Ghost 2003 when I needed one.

You can get by with a very old version of Ghost, since cloning Win9x and DOS is much less complicated than Windows 2000 and newer. No having to worry about duplicate SIDs and stuff.
Click to expand...
Well, I don't know why you'd want to spend money when much better software is available for free, especially since the old versions of Ghost won't even do what the OP wants, i.e. create a bootable restore CD.
 
MikeS said:
Well, I don't know why you'd want to spend money when much better software is available for free, especially since the old versions of Ghost won't even do what the OP wants, i.e. create a bootable restore CD.
Click to expand...

After creating the image on the USB drive and moving it to the newer computer with a burner, just throw a copy of GHOST.EXE along with the image file on the disc, and make the CD bootable. I've been doing it that way for years and years. Works beautifully.
 
Does it have an OEM Windows license on the side of the computer? If so another nice thing if it does is you can (mostly) legitimately get a copy of that Windows OS from someone since that's the actual important part proving you own the license/product not the media. But yeah all those little boot disks like "The Ultimate Boot CD" probably have that stuff in a ready to run iso with other diag applications too. Great find, can't go wrong with that price lol. AND get a nice video card in there (8MB or 16MB) and you can play most of the 3d games out during that time, though may not be the purpose here.
 
Dave Farquhar said:
After creating the image on the USB drive and moving it to the newer computer with a burner, just throw a copy of GHOST.EXE along with the image file on the disc, and make the CD bootable. I've been doing it that way for years and years. Works beautifully.
Click to expand...
As a matter of fact I've also used various versions of Ghost myself for years and years and still do in many circumstances, and in this case it's probably an OK solution.

But in in a general sense, if you'd rather spend money, if your old DOS version recognizes the USB stick and your image in fact fits on that USB stick, it's not a problem that you can't put images on an NTFS partition, and you don't mind a few time-consuming extra steps, by all means. I just thought that other folks might be interested in a pretty good free (and better IMHO) integrated solution for general use.
 
Last edited:
barythrin said:
Does it have an OEM Windows license on the side of the computer?
Click to expand...

No -- were they putting a license sticker on machines in 1999? It does still have the features sticker (CPU/MEM/HD Size, etc) on the bottom of the front panel. No big deal -- everything runs fine. All I have done so far is to remove a few of the trial software packages, and loaded a driver which allows me to read and write USB flash drives.
 
Ken Vaughn said:
No -- were they putting a license sticker on machines in 1999?
Click to expand...

Only with very late Windows 98SE machines, upto then the cert of auth was on the "manual". It was right about the time Windows ME came out that they switched to a sticker on the machine.
 
Ken Vaughn said:
No -- were they putting a license sticker on machines in 1999? It does still have the features sticker (CPU/MEM/HD Size, etc) on the bottom of the front panel. No big deal -- everything runs fine. All I have done so far is to remove a few of the trial software packages, and loaded a driver which allows me to read and write USB flash drives.
Click to expand...
Any chance you could post that USB driver, please? I've only found a few that worked in 98SE; maybe your driver would let me use a few more?

TIA
 
If you do some Googling for "maximus decim" you will find one kick-ass kit of Win98 USB drivers.

My experiences: couple of USB/IDE bridges, 512MB SanDisk, 2GB HP, 2GB Kingston, 320GB Seagate HDD (obviously can't see NTFS partitions but I put one small FAT32 on it for Win98 use), any USB mouse or keyboard...they all just work, though they'll still run you through a new hardware found wizard on first connection.
 
MikeS said:
Any chance you could post that USB driver, please? I've only found a few that worked in 98SE; maybe your driver would let me use a few more?

TIA
Click to expand...

I downloaded mine from:

http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php

Note that there are different drivers for Win 98 FE and Win 98 SE. nusb33e.exe is for Win 98 SE and I have used it successfully on a laptop which I own.
 
Update to my OP. After looking at a few options, I tried Clonezilla. Price was right -- it is GPL, and therefore free.

deadcrickets said:
Try Clonezilla. If you wish a comparison table for the various cloning software available currently go to here.
Click to expand...

Very powerful set of options -- not the most user friendly software I have used, but it works. I was able to create a backup image on a USB flash drive, and subsequently restore the hard drive on the target machine using an image file on a USB flash drive. You can also create an ISO image and burn a CD on another (more current) machine. There are versions for i486, i586, and x64 machines.

Thanks, deadcrickets, for the recommendation.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top