Dave Farquhar
Experienced Member
I checked Info-Zip's FAQ, and it says the 16-bit DOS version can handle about 16,000 files. The 32-bit DOS version can go much higher, over 64K files.
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DOS Hard Drive Backup Solutions?
- Thread starter mbbrutman
- Start date
Mike Chambers
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2006
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- 2,621
here's a good chance for you to test drive that DOS drive imager i made that works over FTP, mike. 
you can open the images in winimage too, or whatever else you like.
http://rubbermallet.org/NETGHOST.EXE
^^ thats the binary alone. you'll need NTCPDRV.EXE set up too of course. it won't kill your disk or anything, i've used it dozens of times. the images it generates can even be booted into with QEMU.
you can open the images in winimage too, or whatever else you like.
http://rubbermallet.org/NETGHOST.EXE
^^ thats the binary alone. you'll need NTCPDRV.EXE set up too of course. it won't kill your disk or anything, i've used it dozens of times. the images it generates can even be booted into with QEMU.
So Mike, have you made any progress on this? I'm curious what route you end up taking. Another option I didn't even think of is just a simple parallel port (or scsi if you have an 8-bit scsi card) zip drive. I forgot I used to use that on my older systems as well to transfer larger files if I didn't feel like using the null modem network.
I haven't gotten back to it yet. I'll probably use InfoZip. At worst case I only have about a dozen portable mass storage devices that I can hook up temporarily to do a file by file copy. And xcopy over the network should be fine too.
It's a 1GB drive with a few partitions. The partitions are in the 200 to 300mb range, so it's not a small task. I've imaged it before using early versions of imaging programs that would still boot and run on a 386-40. Mike is onto something with the FTP program that treats the hard drive partition as a pseudo-file, and I've thought about adding that to my FTP program. That works fine for the current partition, but it gets messy when you want to back up the other partitions. (DOS has a way to access sectors by LBA, but a lot of early BIOSes don't, so it can get tricky using the BIOS calls and getting the mappings right.)
It's a 1GB drive with a few partitions. The partitions are in the 200 to 300mb range, so it's not a small task. I've imaged it before using early versions of imaging programs that would still boot and run on a 386-40. Mike is onto something with the FTP program that treats the hard drive partition as a pseudo-file, and I've thought about adding that to my FTP program. That works fine for the current partition, but it gets messy when you want to back up the other partitions. (DOS has a way to access sectors by LBA, but a lot of early BIOSes don't, so it can get tricky using the BIOS calls and getting the mappings right.)