Hey y'all,

So as it relates to my vintage software & hardware museum/collection, I had been using two systems for drive imaging: Ghost (DOS) for old-school systems (pre-Pentium 4), and Clonezilla (partclone/partimage etc) for newer systems. Ghost version 5.x and newer fit the bill perfectly, but 286 support ended with version 3.x and 8088 support ended with version 2.x. Now that I am working on images for 286 and 8088/8086 boxes, I have been writing those drives on the bench and then dropping them into the older machines, which isn't ideal. I'm aware that Ghost version 2.x had some serious limitations and could only do whole disks and not partitions. I first started using Ghost back in 1998 when the motherboards I used came bundled with copies of it, then later used Norton Ghost 2001 and 2003, as well as the corporate solution 7.x and 8.x. I never had the chance to mess with the older versions or obtain copies of them. My software collection does include a sealed copy of 3.1 from Binary Research, but i'm not planning to open it up.

I could just clone those pre-386 drives on the bench, but I would love to be able to drop-in modified images without pulling drives. The technical capability is there. I don't need compression or anything advanced. If it could "source" image files from drives I've setup in the batch file leading up to the program loading (local internal, or even external parallel, network SMB shares, etc) that would be perfect. And to be honest, I prefer the old CGA-compatible graphics versus the newer point-and-click stuff in DOS. I was a total speed demon with keyboard shortcuts in DOS apps back then and felt like the old graphics were easier on the eyes (think Norton Commander 🤣). I wish I could obtain the source code to the pre-3.x versions and get someone to help work on it, but I know that ain't happening.

...Curious if y'all know of any similar, but maybe lesser-known software out there. Or know of someone who has written a clone of Ghost for DOS that will run on 8088. I'm aware of HDDIU (vintagecomputing.info) that appears to still be a work-in-progress, but ideally I would like to use only two programs for all systems, one each for older and newer. And I would like that older imaging program to have a graphical interface like the old versions of Ghost. I've sifted through archives of Shareware dating back to the late 80s, and I don't recall ever seeing anything like that from my time working on systems back then. Of course, in the old DOS days, it seems like everyone was using batch files and file copy utilities. Still, on old DOS systems, my testing has shown no comparison at all between imaging drives and doing batch-file restoration. For example, I can run a Packard Bell factory restore which goes file-by-file, wears out optical drives, and it takes at least an hour or so to complete. But then, I can capture and restore an image using Ghost on that same box, same source and destination drives, and it takes less than a few minutes to restore the whole thing! Literally zip-zip and the whole box is done...I like that...that's what I want.

Dazzle me with something cool I haven't stumbled on!! Pleaseeeeee...🤣