IIRC WinImage had a hard-drive imaging ability (to VHD?). Image restoring i'm not so sure

Norton Systemworks Pro 2000 has a version of Ghost that works well with Windows 95. I just did a clone myself.

You can find it on archive.org.

Most disk imaging software I've seen boots off a CD or floppy and works independently of the OS.

Just about anything will do, as long as you have another system handy to generate the boot CD. Macrium Reflect and Paragon or Linux-based stuff like PING would do.

Thanks for the quick response! I will try norton ghost as I have a cd already burned. I didnèt realize most are self booting and can image a drive regardless of OS. I just wonder if the Fat16 will be a problem. I will report how it works, thanks!

Tommaso

Older Norton Ghost DOS versions does not need self booting, being in a bootable MS-DOS/Free DOS floppy is all that's needed. It can handle FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and even HPFS (OS/2) partitions/disks easily.

There is also a much modern cloning software (Acronis Trueimage) available freely from Western Digital and Seagate. This will help you create a bootable CD and will handle also all the modern OSs.

http://www.intowindows.com/download-acronis-t … ital-hdd-users/

Please note that these free versions of Trueimage will work only for WD and Seagate disks respectively. Either the source or target disk is being Seagate/WD is ok though (including external USB ones).

There are also Linux based self bootable free software available of course (Clonezilla, etc.) but I have not much experience with them.

Also, not all versions of Ghost will work with Windows 95, and some require OSR2. The version that comes with Systemworks Pro 2000 worked with my OSR2 build. This version does NOT allow saving an image to a CD-R, however. I can do this with Ghost 2003 on my 98SE box, and it is super convenient because you can have a different CD-R for different hardware configs, each one self-booting.

I have Paragon Hard Disk Manager, you guys think that will work wellÉ I am going to tackle this problem tonight and am going to use the advice I got here to work with. Thanks, I will update tonight how it goes - I got my fingers crossed.

Tommaso

I have been backing up all my retro systems with a simple IDE to USB adapter. Makes it pretty effortless and you can get one for like $5 shipped. http://www.ebay.com/itm/IDE-SATA-To-USB-2-0-C … r-/122172885280

A lot of full-disk-image utilities won't much care what filesystem is on the drive, either. Some, like Ghost, can pull some shortcuts if they can read the FS, but even if they can't, a bit-for-bit image is still possible.

If Paragon Hard Disk Manager doesn't work, there are several bootable Linux CDs that would do the trick, too. (If all else fails, the dd and cat tools can image a disk, in the brute-force-and-bloody-massive-ignorance mode.)

Ok, I kind of cheaped out. I just added my SD card as a secondary hard drive and used Windows back up to make a back up of my C drive, a full back up not incremental. I think this will work, the only problem being if the drive ever dies, I will have to reinstall Win95 from CD (which I have) and then open the restore back up program and restore from my Sd card. I am almost sure this is the way it works. Anyone want to assure me of this as I have never tried this before. It seems logical this will work, but I am sure a clone of the drive would have been much easier as I wouldnèt have to first install Windows 95 from disk.

Tommaso

I should probably emphasize that the reason most imaging programs run from a boot disk is that problems can sometimes crop up when a program tries to copy a file that is currently in use.

If you want, you can in theory get away with just re-starting in MS-DOS mode and using XCOPY32 to copy your Windows (and probably Program Files) directories to another disk.

Have you not tried any of the suggestions offered so far? Were any of them unsatisfactory for some reason?

P.S. Have you not noticed that your keyboard appears to be stuck in a Canadian French layout?
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2017/01/editoria … ion-marks-nowe/

clonezilla works fine for Win9x with one caveat: I have not gotten it to work when restoring to a larger drive for the purpose of expanding the partition to increase drive space. This works fine for XP and higher and linux, but for whatever reason, on Win9x the drive becomes unbootable. However, if you just restore the image to a larger drive and keep the partition table the same size (leaving the extra drive space unpartitioned), then it works fine. Weird. I even tried restoring without expanding, then later using gparted to expand the partition size and it still fails to boot after resizing.

I bet if you found an old copy of PowerQuest DriveImage on ebay, it would work fine. Thinking about doing that myself.

You can always expand the drive after using GParted.

gdjacobs wrote:

You can always expand the drive after using GParted.

Doesn't work. Read my last post again. 😀

Bah, I've been doing that a lot today.

FAT32 can be safely expanded, but GParted might be clobbering the MBR. I'd try growing the volume and restoring the boot record on a test drive.