New to the board -- hi!

I recently acquired this Compaq Presario CDS 510 system in really nice condition. Unfortunately the guy couldn't find the original keyboard, otherwise it's all there, quite minty and working.

(Sorry -- poor phone photo)

As far as I can tell, the CDS 510 was the very lowest-end of the systems with this form factor. It sports an Intel 486 SX/33, 4 MB of RAM soldered to the mainboard, 270 MB Quantum IDE hard drive, 2X Mitsumi IDE CD-ROM, a (VLB?) Cirrus Logic GD5424 with 512K graphics RAM, ESS 688 audio, and a 14.4K fax modem (all three on the main board).

This particular machine is dated November 1994, and going by various documents found on the hard drive, it seems to have been in business use -- writing invoices and such -- as late as 2007. Impressive!

It runs MS-DOS 6.2 and Compaq-branded Windows 3.1 with all the various stuff that came bundled with the machine originally: Microsoft Works 3.0, Encarta '95, Compuserve trial, etc -- more importantly, though, it has the original DOS drivers for power management, CD-ROM, mouse etc as well as the parition with BIOS Setup and diagnostics utilities which Compaq machines like this one used to have on a hidden 2 MB disk partition instead of in ROM.

Which brings me to my questions:

I urgently need to preserve the original software before something happens. The hard disk seems fine for now but of course, a drive from 1994 may be living on borrowed time as this point, so I need to back up all this stuff before it's too late. In particular, I need to make an image of the 2 MB partition with the Setup stuff.

So: what is my best option for something that can run from MS-DOS and write raw partition data to an image file on disk? An old version of Norton Ghost? Something else? I wish this was *nix so I could just dd if=/dev/hda of=file, but alas...

The SX33 is slo-o-ow on some games and nearly nothing I remember from my childhood runs (well) in 4 MB. I threw in 16 MB of extra RAM I had lying around but sometimes the system crashes when playing Sim City 2000, for instance, so I guess maybe the RAM is bad. In order to speed things up a bit, I ordered 32 MB (what luxury!) of additional RAM as well as a DX/2 66 (which I believe the board will take no questions asked -- the DX/4's may be iffier since the board doesn't run at 3.3V).

In my childhood, which I am kind of reliving through this system, I had a DX/4 100 with 256K of L2 cache and a 1 MB CL-GD5432 (I think that was what the chip was called -- going on hazy memories here). So pretty much the next step up or two from this Compaq.

This machine has *no* L2 cache nor sockets for it. How much does this actually matter when playing games of the 1993-97 era or doing random Win 3.1 stuff?

Also, what's the difference between the CL-GD5224 and the '32? I was plenty happy with the latter back in the day...

Would greatly appreciate any help! 😀