Rufus ?
https://rufus.ie/

I have an OS image on a CDROM disk. What is the best way to copy these contents to a hard drive ?

What type of image? How did you create it? Ideally, you use the same software to restore it.

I downloaded it from an IBM museum website. It’s a hard-drive image of the original install.
It has all the files extracted in a directory.
They are just DOS and Windows’s files and boot files.
A typical hard drive image.

I could use “xcopy” command but that does not work to well.

It's not an image then. xcopy should work as long as you add parameters for copying hidden files and sub-folders. Note however that the system files can not be just copied over, so you won't get a bootable partition by just copying the files back. You need to boot from a floppy with exactly the same version of DOS and do a "sys a: c:" afterwards.

derSammler wrote:

It's not an image then. xcopy should work as long as you add parameters for copying hidden files and sub-folders. Note however that the system files can not be just copied over, so you won't get a bootable partition by just copying the files back. You need to boot from a floppy with exactly the same version of DOS and do a "sys a: c:" afterwards.

What command syntax should I use ?

Just use Windows 3.1 file manager or the likes of XTree, Norton Commander et el and drag the files across. If there is a file called setup.exe or install.exe or restore.exe in the cd root directory run that.

FileMaven can also be used as a file manager. It can copy whole directory structures, afaik.

Why do some so called ex IT professionals make things appear so difficult?

Caluser2000 wrote:

Why do some so called ex IT professionals make things appear so difficult?

Good question, haha. 🤣 If it was me, I'd just provide an HDD image in RAW format, so anyone with an USB-IDE adapter,
Win32DiskImage and Windows or Linux/Mac/BSD (+WINE) could just write the image back 1:1, including fisk geometry, disk id, boot sectors etc. 😀
Or just by using some old dd-like tools for software that the system used to run natively (OS/2, Windows 3.x etc).
Anyway, the providers of the "image" apparently thought that the old target systen must be used to handle a restoration media no matter what.
Hence, they stored the content in a zip file/ISO image etc, so these huge masses of data can be temporarily stored somehow.
In case of the latter, I wonder why they did not include some batch file or installer which assists the user.. 🙄

There most likely is a helper file if it's made from the original restore cd or a boot disk image to create a boot disk to start the restore routine and rawrite or a *exe file to create that restore boot disk.

Here is what is on the CD.
I want to boot off a DOS 6.21 boot disk and run a command to copy all the files to the hard-drive.
But I need the best way to do this without changing any of the original file directories and attribs.

What is the best way to do this ?

See above. That does not look like a recovery CD lay out just a copy of an fresh install copied straight over to a cd rom. As long as your current hdd has the same IBM Dos it's just a straight tranfer of all the files/folders. You can do this in an external usb hdd caddy on a modern machine if you want to.

I don’t want to remove the drive from the case as it is bolted in and difficult to remove.
Is there a DOS command I can use to copy all these files at once from cdrom to hard drive ?

Google "copy a complete cd to hardrive using xcopy" and see what pops up. I recommend DR Dos xcopy. It's more reliable and doesn't miss files.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I don’t want to remove the drive from the case as it is bolted in and difficult to remove.
Is there a DOS command I can use to copy all these files at once from cdrom to hard drive ?

Why removing at all ? Provided there's enough space inside, an USB adapter also works with the IDE drive installed just fine. 😉
In fact, you *could* just leave it connected to the old PC's PSU, too. (Not recommended because of potential differences etc, though.)

There were also links to real restore images on a dedicated IBM PS/1 site in one of his previous threads. I wonder if the OP has looked there.

Okay, I used the following command “xcopy e:\*.* s/e/ c:”
That copied everything on the CDROM disk to the hard-drive including subdirectories and empty directories.

Worked great.

Thats good to hear.