I use Norton Ghost 2003. You can create a DOS bootable diskette after you install the software in Windows.

If you want to create an image from within your more modern operating system, I use a USB-to-CF adapter and the freeware Win32DiskImager.

If you want to create an image from within your more modern operating system, I use a USB-to-CF adapter and the freeware Win32DiskImager

That's exactly what I was looking for! Thanks!

The only disadvantage is that if you have a large CF or SD card, say 64 GB and want to make a clone of it, but the card only has an 8 GB partition with, say 2 GB worth of data, your image size saved will still be 64 GB. It can fill your hard drives very quickly. So I recommend using the smallest CF/SD cards for your retro systems for cloning purposes. The disadvantage of that is that usually the smaller CF/SD cards don't have the better cards for use as a hard drive. This would be A1/A2 specification for SD cards. For CF cards, the smallest UDMA 7 card with 160 MB/s speed I could find was 32 GB (SanDisk Extreme PRO).

I been in an argument about this before on MSFN, but you should be able to just copy paste the whole drive, to another drive thats been formated fat32 and has a msdos bootsector and it should boot right up. You dont nessesarily need clone software for 98se especially on a CF drive that you can just pull out and insert into a CF reader on XP or somthing. The only caveat for this is if you had drive translation software like ontrack on it so you could run over 500mb bios.

Un hide all files and system files before doing so.

GNU/Linux DD.
You can download GParted iso or a Live distribution, burn it on a DVD or CD ROM and then you dd tool to make a copy 1:1.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Disk_cloning

feipoa wrote:

The only disadvantage is that if you have a large CF or SD card, say 64 GB and want to make a clone of it, but the card only has an 8 GB partition with, say 2 GB worth of data, your image size saved will still be 64 GB. It can fill your hard drives very quickly. So I recommend using the smallest CF/SD cards for your retro systems for cloning purposes. The disadvantage of that is that usually the smaller CF/SD cards don't have the better cards for use as a hard drive. This would be A1/A2 specification for SD cards. For CF cards, the smallest UDMA 7 card with 160 MB/s speed I could find was 32 GB (SanDisk Extreme PRO).

Well, I have two CF cards in my retro system:

A very old 2GB SanDisk (15MB/S!!!) CF as drive C:\ (has Win98SE on it)

And a very recent UDMA 7 128GB (SanDisk Extreme 120MB/S) as drive D:\ for DOS games and Win98 games. This drive has been formatted to 128GB (no extra, smaller partitions), but it only contains about 30GB worth of games.

Recently, Win98SE reported that it has detected some long-file name corrupted files on the 128GB CF- some ScummVM games that I recently copied onto it), therefore the DOS portion of the Scandisk relegated its task to the its Windows version (had to run Scandisk within Windows that is), and after a long, excruciating *repair* process (mostly had to baby-sit the entire process and choose "ignore bad blocks" option) it finished the process.

Well, I kind of feel that this drive has become *dirty*, therefore I want to backup/clone its contents to another CF Card, format it, and then restore back.

Clonezilla

Clonezilla has some bootable cd-rom images you can download. Some even fit on those pesky mini CD-ROM discs, or at least they did when I used it several years ago.

^^ CloneZilla also has the option to collapse unused space, so a 64GB drive with 2GB data on it would be a 2GB-ish image. It's not completely perfect, especially on FAT systems which suffer from fragmentation problems, but it works well on systems that have just been set up or DOS machines that haven't had a lot of data written & removed over time.

(It still works perfectly fine on fragmented FAT systems, but it just won't compress as much.)

Norton Ghost 2003 also has saves sized-reduced images. I've personally had better luck using Ghost on my old hardware compared to CloneZilla. Of course, that could just mean that I don't know what I'm doing. I've had success using CloneZilla to copy an Ubuntu drive on a 32-bit EFI MacPro when I wanted to upgrade drives. It did require some reading to accomplish though.

I just perform a file system dump.
Create a DOS bootable floppy diskette from ALLbootdisks.com

Then boot from the boot disk and partition and format the CF card.
The use xcopy command to copy and the files and directories to your CF card.
# xcopy /s/e C:\*.* E:\
Where e: is the CF card.
Then sys the CF card to finish.
# sys e:

Or you could attach another CF card or hard-drive as a slave or on another IDE channel and backup to that.

Your done.

Sorry to resurrect this, but has someone used Active@ Disk Image v.2 before?

http://www.disk-image.com/createdisk.htm

Someone else here pointed to that a while ago but have not tried it yet, sorry 😀

feipoa wrote on 2019-10-23, 10:35:

The only disadvantage is that if you have a large CF or SD card, say 64 GB and want to make a clone of it, but the card only has an 8 GB partition with, say 2 GB worth of data, your image size saved will still be 64 GB. It can fill your hard drives very quickly. So I recommend using the smallest CF/SD cards for your retro systems for cloning purposes. The disadvantage of that is that usually the smaller CF/SD cards don't have the better cards for use as a hard drive. This would be A1/A2 specification for SD cards. For CF cards, the smallest UDMA 7 card with 160 MB/s speed I could find was 32 GB (SanDisk Extreme PRO).

That's why you zip the image after. I do all mine that way and it takes away (compresses) all the empty space, leaving you a zip file with the size of only the partitions you have data filling.

Software like Ghost, Acronis, etc that generate smaller images rather then the whole volume size are basically doing the same thing, but they use their proprietary container and formatting.

I've used many backup programs in the past, but forgot their names. 😅
From the DOS days, I do remember Central Point's PC Backup and SyTOS.
And that funny Backup program from Windows 3.x/DOS 6.2x?

By the way, does Win32 Disk Imager run on Windows 98?
If so, it could be used to make a sector-based copy of a CF card.
Works only, of course, if the target/destination is equal or larger than the source.

Like it's been said... Ghost DOS version. It fits on a floppy and just works.

I'm using Macrium Reflect. Still runs on Windows XP and higher. For lower versions I just take out the CF card and image it on my Windows 11 desktop. There is a free version as well which should be enough for most use cases.

kixs wrote on 2022-04-15, 11:16:

Like it's been said... Ghost DOS version. It fits on a floppy and just works.

Can’t seem to find Ghost DOS. Can you provide a link?

C0deHunter wrote on 2022-04-15, 20:21:

kixs wrote on 2022-04-15, 11:16:

Like it's been said... Ghost DOS version. It fits on a floppy and just works.

Can’t seem to find Ghost DOS. Can you provide a link?

You would need to buy a copy. It is not freeware . Clonezilla is free.