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Create a drive image on dos/win95 machine?

Caluser2000 said:
Within "My Computer" yes, but you can still format 720k disks fine in xp using a command prompt session using FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9 No third party tools required. Done it on my usb 3.5" fdd. The issue seems to be using the /s switch in SP3.
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Yes, there has always been confusion about this. I wonder why MS would put this out? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309623 - seems to be bum dope?

Maybe what they were trying to indicate is that you can only format 1.44's within Windows, which I believe is correct. I would imagine that there is a fair percentage of folks who have never been to the command line in Xp (nor ever will).
 
Learnt a long time ago never to take MS KBs as gospel. If I did that my Win98 box wouldn't be capable of reading NTFS drives or never had used usb sticks in NT 4
 
Caluser2000 said:
Within "My Computer" yes, but you can still format 720k disks fine in xp using a command prompt session using FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9 No third party tools required. Done it on my usb 3.5" fdd. The issue seems to be using the /s switch in SP3.
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I believe it will also work using FORMAT A: /F:720. At least I'm pretty sure that's what I've used to get my USB floppy drive to format in 720k before.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Did that and tried to boot the disk in a couple of machines but the boot floppy led lit lit up the floppy was ignored and both systems went to booting off the hard drive.

Edit; turned out the first disk was faultly though it seemed to format ok and I got no read/write errors when creating a boot floppy. Worked fine on the second disk I tried. Booted fine off my 486.
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You're saying that XP-SP3 DID create a MS-DOS boot floppy with about 12 files installed? I tried many floppies from a brand new box. THey are all hd 1.44kb disks. They all do the same thing, fdd led blinks once and its over. Nothing is done. The disks are already formatted btw. However, from the command prompt I CAN force a format, but not with the boot files.
 
Billyray said:
You're saying that XP-SP3 DID create a MS-DOS boot floppy with about 12 files installed? I tried many floppies from a brand new box. THey are all hd 1.44kb disks. They all do the same thing, fdd led blinks once and its over. Nothing is done. The disks are already formatted btw. However, from the command prompt I CAN force a format, but not with the boot files.
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Yes it went fine with the second disk within "My Computer" and booted fine on my Compaq Presario 524 . Did a ver. and its only an ME boot disk.

Got an XP SP2 machine handy at all? Looks like SP3 is a right royal screw up when it comes to floppies.
 
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Just tried another. Worked but got some errors booting so had a second try at formating it in "My Computer" and it's booting fine on the Presario as well. These two disks have had quite a bit of use lately as well. The XP box I'm using is old HP slimline P4 I was given which had been reset back to factory specs updated to SP3 nothing else done to it. Not using it for any internet related stuff, turned off auto updates just in case and was going to put Linux on it.
 
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SkydivinGirl you are awesome, thanks for the netbootdisk recommendation. I created a dos boot disk in windows 7 and had no problem creating the initial netbootdisk. I have four pcmcia network cards and only one was in the list of "included" drivers....however it still didn't work. Using the instructions I included the NDIS drivers for one of my cards and it worked! I was able to map to a network drive on a laptop running winxp. Once mapped I ran ghost.exe (Norton Ghost 2003) from the network drive.

I did two backups one of the full disk and one of just the partition. Both .GHO files ended up the same exact size. I ran the image validator on the images and they passed. Does that mean a restore will work....maybe :) Each backup took about an hour to run and the image is around 350 megs. Pretty speedy!
 
Check to see if your Ghost version includes a program called Ghost Explorer which will let you examine the contents of the Ghost image. Do a quick check on a few files.

Some versions of Ghost have the ability to convert the .GHO file into a .VHD or .VMDK virtual disk for use with an emulator. See http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO10279 for one example. That is a very fast method for testing if the Ghost image was properly created. If the virtual machine works with the image, the image should be perfect for reinstalling on physical hardware.

If you don't have a version of Ghost that can automate the conversion, see http://www.vmware.com/pdf/p2v_thirdpartyimage.pdf Similar methods exist for use with other Virtual Machine software.
 
I did two backups one of the full disk and one of just the partition. Both .GHO files ended up the same exact size. I ran the image validator on the images and they passed. Does that mean a restore will work....maybe Each backup took about an hour to run and the image is around 350 megs. Pretty speedy!
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The ONLY way to confirm if a restore will work is to actually do the restore. Which I highly recommend you do. There is nothing worse than assuming that the image is good only to find out later that it isn't. I save my images in separate directories with a text file that denotes what the image is of, how it was created, how to do a restore and a copy of the program(s) that created it and the program(s) required to do the restore.

Bill
Smithville, NJ
 
pcm2a said:
SkydivinGirl you are awesome, thanks for the netbootdisk recommendation.
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I'm so happy it worked out for you! I'm guessing that disabling SMB V2 allowed you to connect to the share? You should re-enable it if you are sharing files to other Windows systems. :)

As for verifying that the backup is good, natcha is correct. The only way to be 100% sure the backup image is good is to write it back to another drive. If you don't have another drive for the original system, you can do it to another computer. Even if it doesn't boot completely on a different system, it's a good image if you don't get errors writing it back and if it starts to book.

If you want to test recovery on a virtual computer, you can either convert the Ghost files (if you can) or you can use your network boot disk in a virtual environment to connect to the share just like you did with the real system. :)

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

Heather
 
Instead of disabling SMB V2 I dug out an old XP laptop and was able to connect to it with no issues.

Since my CF adapter didn't seem to work in this IBM (bizarre since I use them in other IBMs of this era) I threw 2 gig drive in my spare caddy and restored to it. The restore took about 40 minutes, which was quicker than the backup time. Everything seems to be running great. Ghost even resized the 1.3 gig drive to 2 gigs for me. I wish I had known about netbootdisk years ago!
 
I'm very happy it worked. Before the UNBD I had to make a different boot disk for each network card in each system. Quite a pain.

If your ghost image is small enough, or I you split the image, you can create a bootable CD or DVD with the ghost software and image files on the disk. I use the Windows 98 boot floppy as the bootable CD floppy image because it has CD drivers ready to go.

Heather
 
SkydivinGirl said:
I'm very happy it worked. Before the UNBD I had to make a different boot disk for each network card in each system. Quite a pain.

If your ghost image is small enough, or I you split the image, you can create a bootable CD or DVD with the ghost software and image files on the disk. I use the Windows 98 boot floppy as the bootable CD floppy image because it has CD drivers ready to go.

Heather
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I got UNBD working on my Windows 95, 486 machine thanks to Heather! Great resource to have. :cool2:
 
You may need to update Avast. A few years ago Netbootdisk was redirected to a site filled with Trojans but that seems to have been corrected since.

I am souring on Avast as they seem to be pushing false positives and the rather scammy grime fighter (which may find minor problems but requires payment to fix them).
 
Following up... Now that I got UNBD to work (on my tweener) it seems that this is a one-way network. Is that correct? I'm able to see and use shares on my Windows host machine but it's not possible to see the DOS machine running UNBD from the Windows host machine. I assume this is correct but was wondering if I've missed something that might allow the Windows machine to see (and control) the DOS drive on the machine booted with the UNBD disk.
 
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