Easy!

1. You can clone the drive (e.g. 2 GB > 2GB and make a clone)
2. You can take an image (2GB > Image file on your desktop). You can restore that image file later back onto your 2GB CF card

I'm a big Fan of Acronis. If you have a WD drive in your system, there is a free WD version of Acronis True Image on the WD support site.

It allows you to clone the drive, and take an image.

There are lots of other programs such as Norton Ghost and god knows what.

Fat32 partition is easy peasy for any of these tools.

I'm sure there are plenty of free tools as well, I just don't know which ones. But I do swear by Acronis....

What you want is a drive imaging program. Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage are the most popular ones, but there are also free ones, like Clonezilla.

Like Mau1wurf, I'm personally partial to Acronis.

Thanks for the tip about Clonezilla. I always love free software, but when you don't get recommendations, I never trust if it's for real, or a virus 🤣

I will check it out....

At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Wow, I would love to see something like this in action.

RG100, this is awesome.

You boot Clonezilla from a CD, and then (if you have a DVD burner) can you backup the 2GB CF card onto a DVD-R or DVD-RW!

I've never actually tried Clonezilla, never had any reason to, so don't take my mention of it as a recommendation... it just happened to be the only free one I could think of by name. It may work well, or it may suck.

Thanks a lot for the info. 😀 I tried both suggestions. Acronis for WD is good because it's free. However, it won't "see" the CF, so I couldn't use it for my specific task. CloneZilla is good because it worked, but I had to run it via a boot CD. The problem with that is I couldn't use my machine for other tasks.

I would be interested in using any util that works at the Windows XP desktop, that can "see" a CF device. I have a really old copy of Acronis somewhere. I think it was the last version supported by Windows 98, but it should install OK on Windows XP. I remember it could "see" an external USB HDD. I also remember it was a bit unstable, especially if I ran it within w98, as opposed to a boot CD. Might be OK in wXP. Hopefully, it would be able to see my USB-based CF device. I'll see if I can find it...

The problem with that is I couldn't use my machine for other tasks.

Why can't you just leave the CF in the other machine, and boot the software on that one? That's the way such software is intended to be used. Most of those sorts of software will support saving the image over a network to your main PC, or if you don't have it on a network, you can save it to an external USB harddrive/flashdrive, or if USB won't work, you can slave another IDE drive in there and use that.

Yes that's good thinking, I'll do that. Thanks.

Yea Acronis allows for creation of a Boot CD (not sure if the WD version allows this). Then you can have a USB HDD attached, and image your system HDD onto the USB HDD.

Yea Acronis allows for creation of a Boot CD (not sure if the WD version allows this).

The thing with the WD version though, and I think it's the same with the Seagate and other manufacturer-specific versions, is that they'll often only work for that specific brand of hard drive.

Yea that's very likely...

Try Handy Backup, it's reliable backup software for Windows. I have used several backup programs for years, and I recommend Handy Backup.
Hope it will work for you too.