Bart's Live XP, on CD or on USB stick is one solution.

Pentium II computers came with factory-installed floppy drives. You could consider using a boot floppy.

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-03, 22:51:

I'm currently testing and installing software & games on my recently purchased Pentium II 333. I like to make frequent backups of the SSD because Windows 98 can be finicky but this means constantly removing the cover from the PC which can get tedious. As such, I wonder if there's a bootable CD that could help me out?

I used to use Knoppix for this but this was for PCs quite a bit more modern than this. Basically what I want is the ability to copy the contents of the Windows & Program Files folder to a USB stick as a backup. If Windows screws something up, I'd like the ability to access the drive through this bootable CD and copy the old files back to the SSD.

Does anyone have any idea what would be my best bet? The PC has 128MB of RAM.

Norton Ghost 2003 is available for free on Internet Archive. If you copy the image to a partition on your SSD, you can go back to that image in a few minutes by booting to the Ghost floppy disk.

https://www.knopper.net/knoppix-info/index-en … ml#requirements says Knoppix requires (amongst other things):

Intel/AMD-compatible CPU (i486 and up),
RAM: at least 200 MB for the graphical desktop. Recommended for working with various office applications: 500MB RAM,
a bootable CD-ROM/DVD drive (IDE/ATAPI/SATA, Firewire, USB), or USB flash disk,

Assuming you can boot from CD on your machine, I wonder how much RAM it requires if you don't start the graphical desktop (e.g. use the command line "knoppix 2")?

I happened to have the Knoppix 7.6.1 DVD .iso (a bit old now, but not that old) and I tried booting it in a VirtualBox VM with 128MB of RAM using "knoppix 2" and it brought up the shell with no problems. "top" shows (manually transcribed, commas added):

KiB Mem: 118,396 total, 7,804 free, 16,312 used, 94,276 buff/cache

The "free" amount looks bad but only because there's so much in buffer cache. I can start Emacs, which should take a reasonable amount of RAM compared to the type of tools you want to use.

You'd obviously need to be familiar with Linux command-line usage, e.g. how to mount your USB disk and do the backup.

Knoppix 7.6.1 includes partimage which might be useful for you. I'm not sure but it might be an open source replacement for Norton Ghost.

Try Wary Puppy 5.5

Edit: files... http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/wary-5.5/

Puppy Linux (ver. 4.x or 5.x). If you're really low on RAM, use Damn Small Linux.

Thanks for all the recommendations - I'll give them a look this weekend.

Norton Ghost can save an image to USB, but when I attempted to use it with an MVP3 board, it slowed to a crawl both times and I gave up on it. I assumed that it was because it was USB 1 - saving an image to another partition on the SSD worked well, and took very little time.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-02-08, 22:32:

Norton Ghost can save an image to USB, but when I attempted to use it with an MVP3 board, it slowed to a crawl both times and I gave up on it. I assumed that it was because it was USB 1 - saving an image to another partition on the SSD worked well, and took very little time.

That may be interesting to see if it will detect the USB. I have a PCI card with 4 USB 2 ports.