I used Ghost back then and still use now for old hardware.

kixs wrote on 2023-04-18, 06:20:

I used Ghost back then and still use now for old hardware.

Subscribed to this suggestion! i also use Ghost 2003 that works just fine on every single Windows version NT 4.0 - XP and on every system from Pentium 166 mmx above.

I use ddrescue or dd_rescue on Linux (I can't remember which I normally use or which is better) as at least one of them is able to skip over bad sectors and then retry them later, save a log of where the bad sectors are, etc. I watch the console (or dmesg or the system log) for drive errors. Watching the console for errors was useful as I learned that for one drive I was recovering data from, when it hit a bad sector or something, errors would just start flooding and the drive had to be power cycled for any more data to be read. Power cycling would have been quite annoying if it wasn't attached via USB!

Assuming you're running some tool from Windows, perhaps the Event Log would be useful - maybe it logs when there are errors accessing the drive, that might explain the "handle is invalid". The drive might essentially disappear when you read from a bad sector.

Okay well I went a bit crazy and used macrium , winimage and aeomi plus clone then clonezilla to so backups with multiple program since some of the utilities are flakey , managed to get the dos drive imaged onto a spare dodgy drive I had and it boots.

The 95 drive though seemed to have been the one that was actually failing , not the dos drive.

I have them both in the same pentium 1 rig so I couldn't tell which one was making the noise till I connected them externally via ide to usb.

The faulty drive had trouble being accessed, so I used clonezilla and after alot of waiting managed to image the drive so hopefully I saved it in the nick of time.

I'm currently backing up the 98 drive from the pentium 3 and its going pretty well so hopefully that's everything sorted.