Cloning an MSDOS drive

I recently came into possession of an old 486 DX4 100 equipped MS DOS system, right now it has an ancient 800 meg maxtor PATA drive, is there any way I could clone it to an 80gb drive so I don't have to track down a copy of MSDOS and manually reinstall it when the drive eventually kicks the bucket?

is the drive ide or some older connector.

pata is another way to say ide
ide is parralel ata sata is serial ata

you could get a changer card thingy mcbooble and just use linux dd on a newer system
plz keep in mind that I don't know dos I don't know if it will react well to being on a new drive

if should work if you a low enough level backup and restore it on a similar 800mb drive it shouldnt care either way then, if i remember correctly

clonezilla, but it will partition the larger drive down to the size of the original drive.

If you can get the drive into a new machine, with either an old PATA controller card or some kind of External USB enclosure, you can yank the whole partition to a new drive.

DOS is great in that it is so simple, it just works as long as the hardware is supported.

Just remember it's a 16bit OS. Large drives, even old 20GB PATA drives, may not be recognized by the OS.

Nice find though.

I'm trying to remember, I think I have an old 2GB drive in my DOS 6.22 machine.

why not just install it on a flash drive?
I assume you could do that with dd?

Because USB didn't exist in the days of DOS.

Granted there are USB drivers for DOS these days, but you would still find yourself in a weird situation getting it to boot.

would be an interesting project.

There are pci ide controller cards, which you basicly should be able to use.
If you still can find one, then i guess that would be an option.

Or like Qain said, a USB ide enclosure.
There are also USB to IDE adapters, but i´m not sure how they will work out.

I plugged it into my win xp box and moved a couple games onto the drive cause it turned out my 80gig drive was dead, and I need to find a new one, but now when I put it back in the dos system it gives me either the "no rom basic, system haulted" error or it just doesn't acknowlege the drive exists in anything other then the bios, also now it's reporting as a "maptor" drive instead of maxtor

I can send you a DOS 6 image if you need one

that would be awesome but how would I write it, the system only takes 3.5 inch drives, also would I need to figure out and compile drivers for things like the video card?

THOUGHT: Couldn't he copy it through DOSBox? I have done similar things >.>

that might work, also, the hard drive works fine in my p4 box, it automatically started on MS dos with it. For some reason the 486 DX4 box just hates it now

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It probably updated the configs and the older box has no clue what "Pentium 4" is.

is there any way I can fix that?

If you can find those hardware configs and delete them then yeah, I bet. Otherwise congrats, you have a pentium 4 based DOS drive now.

gurrreat. How should I go about making a brand new dos drive then? I don't want to have this 100mhz 486 with VGA go to waste.