You shouldn't have to clone. Connect a CF card as a second hard drive and use XCOPY with appropriate flags to copy all hidden and system files. Then remove the original drive and, with a DOS boot disc, do FDISK /MBR and SYS C: to make it bootable.

Not familiar with XCOPY, I grew up with Windows 95 so DOS is fairly new to me. What would the appropriate flags be?

google i came up with a couple different variations which basically have me mixed up

XCOPY C:*.* D:\ /c/h/e/k/r
XCOPY C:\ /c/e/f/h/r/s

Then this site gives info for under Windows 95/95
http://www.icompute.info/xcopy_drive_copy.htm

would it be the same under standard DOS 6.0?

You can just type XCOPY /? and it will display all commands. Or type HELP and then choose Xcopy. This is with DOS 6.22.

Dos/Win3.x is really basic file permission wise.
1. Plug in your new hard drive (CF is probably easier) as a 2nd hard drive
2. Copy the system files over by typing sys c: d: (or whatever drive letter the new dive is)
3. Copy the rest of the files over in whichever way your most comfortable just as long as your not in Win3.x. You can plug the drives into a more modern PC if you want a GUI, or dos on the actual PC
4. Finally make the new drive the primary and boot. Dos/windows isn't smart enough to know its on a different drive.

XCopy is nice as it will automatically create folders, sub folders, etc. But if it was me I would have a play installing everything from scratch on the CF/SD card. It's quite easy really and you can always fall back on the old hard drive if you get stuck or missing something. Config.sys and Autoexec.bat is the main things you want to make a record of as this changes from PC config to PC config

I don't remember the name of it, but I used a Unix disk clone tool back in late '99 to do just what you're talking about.

ElectricMonk wrote:

I don't remember the name of it, but I used a Unix disk clone tool back in late '99 to do just what you're talking about.

Surely you mean dd?
Its still around.

But as said above DOS doesn't need it. A simple copy and boot record repair is all that is needed

Yup, DD was it. We used it, since we needed a bit for bit clone. We were using Linux, not DOS, so that's what we decided upon.

I've also used imageblaster, and few other tools, but those are overkill for what subby is trying to do.