I used to have a 486DX4/DOS laptop. I still do, but it's at my mother's house, and it's currently disassembled. 🙁 Worse yet, it doesn't have a hard drive. 🙁 However, it has an external Parallel Iomega Zip100 drive, and it helps. I also have a network to another computer with another Zip100 drive, and both computers have a large RAM drive. I recommend that you buy a Parallel Zip drive off of eBay. Two problems, though: 1. you need to find a way to get the necessary drivers to your computer, and 2. its disks aren't 100% reliable. They usually come with a Guest driver, but it's kind of large. You can look at https://dosprograms.info.tt/indexall.htm#utils for palmsys. It is very small. I had problems where it didn't always work, but another person here said it was reliable. Try it out.

I have a parallel ZIP drive, but it is only 100MB. The data on HD is about 220MB....

Anyways I put a Norton Ghost 2003 with paralink and it seems to be working. It will now just take almost 2 hours to clone the drive 😁

Why are you opposed to opening a laptop in 2024?

You're right. It would not be enough to clone a 220MB hard drive. It should be enough if you're just backing up the hard drive and compressing the backup. I tried. 😀

ldeveraux wrote on 2024-09-18, 13:20:

Why are you opposed to opening a laptop in 2024?

It is a Toshiba T1950CT, which has hard drive buried in the case. So it takes at least 2 hours to get it out and back together.
They put the hard drive first in the bottom case, after that they put everything else on top.
I had disassembled it one or two times in the past (replacing defective capacitors), so if possible, I would not be doing it again 😀

Also, the floppy drive belt failed that I would need to replace, and LCD started to develop vinegar syndrome - luckily it is an active matrix, so it is still very visible and polarizers are cheap to get.
So when I get some time, I will do a full restoration on it, but for now, I just backed up the HDD.
At that point I would also replace the HDD with a CF.

And yeah, Ghost 2003 can image the drive that is being booted from

Dualy wrote on 2024-09-19, 11:37:

It is a Toshiba T1950CT, which has hard drive buried in the case. So it takes at least 2 hours to get it out and back together. […]
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ldeveraux wrote on 2024-09-18, 13:20:

Why are you opposed to opening a laptop in 2024?

It is a Toshiba T1950CT, which has hard drive buried in the case. So it takes at least 2 hours to get it out and back together.
They put the hard drive first in the bottom case, after that they put everything else on top.
I had disassembled it one or two times in the past (replacing defective capacitors), so if possible, I would not be doing it again 😀

That's nuts, I think you're doing it wrong haha