Do you need an absolute image of the drive? Or do you just need the information? If the latter, you can Google PKZip or DOSRAR, and they can compress the contents of the hard drive. I think DOSRAR requires a 386 or better, while PKZip should work on an 8086. I can also recommend some alternate DOS drives that are more efficient than the original and ways to better your system's memory configuration. Want them?

I'd like both to be honest.
The drive is copying the data at the moment via Norton Commander to the Zip drive, I got that working with this driver, no problem: https://dosreloaded.de/forum/thread/8430-zip- … 5150-und-neuer/

I found a version of Norton Backup and will try that for imaging when the copying is done.

I'd like to image the drive because I'm certain I will have problems restoring the drive to the current configuration should I ever want to return to it.

Okay. I believe I can help you optimize your system's performance. Do you want it?

Ok I'm imagining it

maxtherabbit wrote on Yesterday, 00:22:

Ok I'm imagining it

Yeah, sorry, couldn't change the title 😁

Harry Potter wrote on 2025-07-19, 23:53:

Okay. I believe I can help you optimize your system's performance. Do you want it?

Not at the moment, thanks, I'm still in the process of learning 😀

OK so, the copying ran through the night and was mostly successful, I even got a bootable floppy disk out of the existing system so I feel pretty confident I would be able to restore anything on there.
Problem is, there are a lot of reading errors (as to be expected) so I would need something like ddrescue...
I also have some 486 machines, is it possible to insert a MFM controller to access the harddisk there? Would make things a lot easier.

Yes, that's what I did in a similar situation many years ago. I just put the drive and the controller into a Windows 98 machine (configuring it as drive D: via jumpers) and then imaged it using WinImage.

ETA: This will not work if the drive has physical damage though. (Read errors). WinImage cannot handle that.

I had another drive (IDE) with this problem and used ROBOCOPY with /MIR /R:0 /W:0 options (run multiple times over several days, with the drive kept in freezer overnight) to recover about 95% of the files. ROBOCOPY is not available in Windows 98 though.

I did HDD imaging on XT-class machines.

Example solution:
- insert a NIC, popular 3C509B should work in 8-bit slot if configured for IRQ<=7, there are also LPT NICs
- set up mTCP NetDrive, or any other network-attached storage
- use DISKEDIT from Norton Utilities - https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/dum … 99/#post-741177

I've also done this over the network, but using a small program that just reads every sector using BIOS calls. The end result is a full image of the hard drive. With a little more work the DOS partitions can be extracted and loopback mounted under Linux, or even used with mTCP NetDrive as a remote hard drive.

If you have done your imaging already then you are set. If you need help then send me an email.