CU_AMiGA wrote:

My question is, is it possible just to straight up copy the contents from the hard drive to the compact flash without screwing anything up (like the boot up, etc) - yeah i'm lazy! 😁

Why not try it and find out?

If you want more details, you'll need to explain more about the "dual boot" you're using. Do you have two separate partitions, or what? MS-DOS 6.22 cannot boot from an 8 GB partition, so I assume you're not using that.

The most straightforward way of doing things would be to use drive cloning software like Norton Ghost, Macrium, Paragon, or PING.

It is on a single partition - nothing fancy. I have DOS (from Win 98) and Windows 98 in 2 separate folders, and using a menu to pick which one to boot from. I do remember trying in the past, manually copying it from on drive to another whilst in a Win 98 environment. I remember everything being copied ok, but for some reason the CF wouldn't boot! 🙁

CU_AMiGA wrote:

I have DOS (from Win 98) and Windows 98 in 2 separate folders, and using a menu to pick which one to boot from.

I cannot imagine what purpose it could possibly serve to have "DOS (from Win 98)" in a separate folder.

I remember everything being copied ok, but for some reason the CF wouldn't boot! 🙁

Yes, you need to write the boot sector. Typically this is done from the command prompt by typing "sys x:", where "x:" is the drive letter of your CF card. I think you might also have to set the "Active" flag of the CF card's partition using fdisk, but that's probably not necessary.

Use an old copy of Norton Ghost. Everything will be ok.

It's useful to boot up in pure DOS so that you have better compatibility with certain games.

CU_AMiGA wrote:

It's useful to boot up in pure DOS so that you have better compatibility with certain games.

But of course – but you don't need to store DOS in a separate folder for that. You can just press F8 when starting up Windows and select "Command Prompt Only" from the resulting menu. Or there are certain edits you can make to MSDOS.SYS.

Meh! I didn't know about that. I do also have Windows 3.1 installed as well, so it's kind of a 3 OS in 1! 😉 Nevermind anyway. I will have a look on youtube and see if there is any solutions on there. The reason why i am switching to flash storage is mainly due to the heat coming out of the hard drive! It gets bloody hot and i'm a bit worried it may cause the tiny laptop to overheat! 😖

CU_AMiGA wrote:

The reason why i am switching to flash storage is mainly due to the heat coming out of the hard drive! It gets bloody hot and i'm a bit worried it may cause the tiny laptop to overheat! 😖

It seems reasonable to assume that the laptop was built with adequate consideration given to thermal dissipation. But whatever.

Cant be too careful! Probably overclocking the Pentium to 266mhz didn't help it either! 😜