Well if you're sending it to someone, it'd be a good idea to ask what tools would be handy for him.

Otherwise, if you can boot from a CD, I highly recommend Clonezilla, which is free and open-source and can backup both to images as well as clone drives: http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/

Failing that, you can find an old copy of Norton (or even pre-Norton) Ghost, which can fit on a single 3.5" floppy. Edit: Norton/Symantec changed Ghost somewhere around 2002-2005ish to be more of a Windows backup program rather than a small bootable imaging program so when I said "an old copy" I mean it. You can sometimes find it on Ebay or, well, I'm sure you know of alternate methods.

You could also just zip everything up if you like - make sure to include hidden and system files - your archive software may exclude those (or at least hidden files) with default switches. If you go this route, you'll want to use a boot disk and use the command "sys" (and possibly need to also go into fdisk and set active partition) to get the system files copied properly. Honestly try to avoid this option if you can unless he insists on you sending him a standard zip file.

HDDs are usually not backed up into ISO... Usually it's either a proprietary format or a standard archiving type format like GNU tar.

kenrouholo wrote:

Well if you're sending it to someone, it'd be a good idea to ask what tools would be handy for him.

This is what it all comes down to. Different programs will use different image formats and they aren't always compatible with one another.

I think with Windows 9x you can just use WinImage? It's what I use to image old DOS drives.

ETA: regarding Clonezilla - is there a way of forcing it to copy 'dirty' NTFS drives?

Try RAWCOPY sector-by-sector copy:
http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/

Errius wrote:

ETA: regarding Clonezilla - is there a way of forcing it to copy 'dirty' NTFS drives?

Clonezilla supports 3 methods with NTFS.. ntfsclone, partclone, dd. dd should definitely work but not ideal as far as space or time (though compression will make the space issue better... and the time issue worse). I think there may be an option you can set to not check it though. Fairly certain.

The problem I had was imaging a laptop drive which had a proprietary OEM partition. Clonezilla refused to copy it because it was 'dirty', but there was no way of running chkdsk on it.

What about norton ghost 2003 ? It works fine under MS-DOS

If you have network card installed, you can use http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ to image the drive to a ftp server.
if you prefer to image or clone the drive from DOS, you can find Dolly at http://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=14&p=14

Errius wrote:

The problem I had was imaging a laptop drive which had a proprietary OEM partition. Clonezilla refused to copy it because it was 'dirty', but there was no way of running chkdsk on it.

Have you tried -q1 Priority: only dd in the expert mode?

Not sure if this was the type of answer you were looking for, but to backup my DOS machine, I use Active Disk Image and a IDE>USB adapter. I just take out the HDD, plug it into the adapter and run the disk imager. It is only a 504MB drive, but it does a complete copy in 45 seconds. The image is 100% bootable.

Hope this helps!

Well it will cost you some, but I use a Disk Cloner to clone my drives, mine is a SATA 2 port that I have SATA to IDE and SATA to Molex Adapters on it for cloning IDE, but it does a sector by sector copy, only rule is the destination drive must be larger or equal in size to the source