Cloning the Hard Drive for a Windows 95 Machine

Do you have W95 and other installation CDs for a clean install ?

haha you are strange. it do not depend on os, but mainboard.

check up you mainboard to see if it has IDE interface. buy a flate cable, then connect it. copy all. enough. very simple. only 10 or 20 munites.

if your mainboard has only usb interface (mostly impossible), try this way, connect internet or internate from serial port interface with a moderm from either of computers, then ok. copy.

3]connect them directly with a cable. or from parallel port. etc. too many ways to do it.

Windows 95 is written on FAT16 or FAT32 format.

Windows XP is written on NTFS format.

FAT16 or 32 can be read using another file-system, but if you attempt to write it using another file-system, especially an attempt to Scandisk or Defragment it using another file-system, such as NTFS - it can render that disk non-valid in the old configuration.

As cnpower suggested - copy your valuables, and forget about restoring it

I think you haven't tried with GHOST software of BINARY RESEARCH. With the help of this you can copy to any other hard drive in the machine where you have windows 95 installed. But the limitation is only for FAT file system.

continue with this, I think you can get a better and positive result indeed.

I use ghost all the time. It work great. I can clone a hard drive in 10 minutes or so, depending on how I connect.

Rlindey,

Can you direct me to a website or procedure on how to clone a HD?

I will appreciate it very much.

Regards

DJ

This is from Norton Ghost (Symantic) Ghost

http://ghost.radified.com/

Hope it helps

"dd" for linux is quite useful. I found this link when I googled "cloning hard drive using dd":

http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints/os_clone/os_cloning.html

If you have a bootable CD or Floppy drive on your Windows 95 machine, you might be able to use the old computer to copy an image of the hard drive to a file either on another computer on the network or on an external USB drive (assuming your Win95 machine has a USB port accessible to Linux even though it's wasted on W95). You can even copy data to another computer through a serial port but it can be painful...

I've had good luck with the DamnSmallLinux distribution at http://damnsmalllinux.org. Floppy images are even available for you to boot up from floppy if the CD isn't bootable on your machine!

Are the drives the same size (storage size, not physical)? I would imagine your new one might be larger, because they probably don't make the size of the old one anymore.

The ideal situation would be to use the old machine to accomplish the cloning, and clone to an identical drive (same manufacturer and size), which is probably not possible, but if at all doable, that's the way to go. Is the old machine a stand-alone computer, or some other piece of equipment, that uses a computer to run it? Does the BIOS in the old machine recognize the new drive? If you can't get past that hurdle, you won't get anywhere. What error do you get when you try to boot to the new, cloned drive? Is there a chance that there is a BIOS update available for the old machine? Often a BIOS update will include support for newer, larger drives. If you're sure the drive is being recognized, meaning the BIOS reports a drive being attached, AND reports it as being the proper size, then I would try to use Acronis to create a bit-for-bit image of the old drive, this is an option that is off by default in Acronis, and would be selected sometime during the clone wizard setup. You might try the cloning using other software as mentioned by other posters, such as Ghost or one of the many free Linux utilities available for the task.

If you are running into problems because of the new drive being larger, there may be a jumper setting on the new drive, or a software drive overlay that can be applied, to make the drive "look" like a smaller drive, and get around a BIOS limitation of the drive size.

If you answer a couple of the questions I posed, I might be able to offer some other suggestions. I've been in this same situation, and with a bit of imagination and ingenuity, you can probably get there eventually.

Tom

tdesmit,

I have pasted your questions into the responces so i can add my answers:

Are the drives the same size (storage size, not physical)?

• No the drives nowadays are much larger. I could not get the 40 and 80 MB drives as installed i the old Pcs.

The ideal situation would be to use the old machine to accomplish the cloning, and clone to an identical drive (same manufacturer and size), which is probably not possible, but if at all doable, that's the way to go. Is the old machine a stand-alone computer, or some other piece of equipment, that uses a computer to run it? Does the BIOS in the old machine recognize the new drive? If you can't get past that hurdle, you won't get anywhere. What error do you get when you try to boot to the new, cloned drive? Is there a chance that there is a BIOS update available for the old machine? Often a BIOS update will include support for newer, larger drives. If you're sure the drive is being recognized, meaning the BIOS reports a drive being attached, AND reports it as being the proper size, then I would try to use Acronis to create a bit-for-bit image of the old drive, this is an option that is off by default in Acronis, and would be selected sometime during the clone wizard setup. You might try the cloning using other software as mentioned by other posters, such as Ghost or one of the many free Linux utilities available for the task.

• My BIOS are drom circa 1996. It can recognise another drive if it is plugged in.

If you are running into problems because of the new drive being larger, there may be a jumper setting on the new drive, or a software drive overlay that can be applied, to make the drive "look" like a smaller drive, and get around a BIOS limitation of the drive size.

If you answer a couple of the questions I posed, I might be able to offer some other suggestions. I've been in this same situation, and with a bit of imagination and ingenuity, you can probably get there eventually.

Tom

OK djacob, I'm easily confused, so bear with me. Are you the original poster, or trying to add something to my post?

Tom

Old HD is 8GB. New one is 80GB. When I truned on after I hooked up the HD, it went through start up and froze when it looked for HD. Computer is hooked up to machine control (processor). During normal start up, it didn't even go to windows screen. It went to machine's coustom screen like speed, positions and etc. It is windows base HMI (human machine interface) screen. It boots up and loads all the HMI software and shows the screen and you can scroll the pages to see machine setup and parameters by soft buttons below the screen.

May be I need to format it with windows 95. Does it have to be the windows 95 from that machine or any windows 95? I don't remember how to format with win95. Some fdisk and stuffs.

Thanks

Teal,

Sounds like the new drive is not being recognized by the system BIOS, which is not surprising. Have you checked with the system manufacturer (if they are still around) to see if there might be a BIOS update available? If the system manufacturer is around, perhaps they can offer some assistance? How about a Goggle for the machine, to see if someone else has been there, done that?

Are you able to get into the system BIOS? Back when that machine was made, auto-detection of drives could still be problematic. Is there a "user" setting for the IDE drives? As I mentioned, you're not going to get anywhere until the system can properly "see" the new drive. Even if you get a good image on it, it won't do you any good unless the system BIOS knows how to "talk" to the new drive.

I see three options here; A BIOS update that will provide support for your new drive, a "drive overlay" from the disk-drive manufacturer that will allow the new drive to "fake" the parameters of the old drive (Cylinders, Heads and Sectors settings), or find a good, used (or possibly new-old stock) drive of the same model/capacity.

As far as how best to format the new drive, that's not really coming into play here as long as you are doing a sector-by-sector cloning of the old drive. The cloning process should force the drive to have a "bootable" partition of the same size as the old drive, and the format will match, and should be FAT32. Let us know how it's going.

Tom

The target hard drive should be formatted first in Fat16 before cloning using the DOS from Win95 (on a bootable floppy is usually best), but good cloning software should also do that. (But as the only cloning software I have used is Ghost, I am not very reliable on that last point!)

A bigger problem is if your mainboard is relatively new, most MBs made over the last 5 years or so do not support Win95, look in the manual to see if true or not!!

Thanks for all the replies.

The new drive is 80GB. I think windows 95 can't format that big. Can I use any computer that has windows 95 to format the HD or I have t use the one on the machine? I will try to format with win95 and try cloaning it again.

Windows 95 DOS line-command (with fdisk.exe) line will only recognise up tp 2 GB of partition size to format in FAT 16 file-system.

Windows 98 DOS line-command (with fdisk.exe) line will only recognise up tp 64 GB

Windows 2000 and XP first-edition will only recognise up to 128 GB (it says up to 132 GB, but don't count on it) of partition size to format in NTFS 32 file-system.

Only Windows XP SP-2 edition and Vista will go higher.

- - - -

Windows 95 will not be able to recognise an 80 Gig HDD, let alone format it.

Yo need another machine already running Windows 95 or Windows 98, to which you can hook your bad HDD, and try to fix it from there, probably using Scan-Disk or Check-Disk utilities, then trying to salvage whatever possible from there, then re-formatting it, for any possible future use, if any such use is required.

If you make say a 2 GB FAT16 with another PC with either Knoppix or even Win9x, can you then install/clone the disk over.....

What about buying some older smaller drives on ebay?

I have a feeling that there must be a way......but I have never ever needed to do it....I wish all concerned a little bit of luck as well.

Has anyone actually made win 95 run on a large modern HD? Do you have to make a small (less than 32 GB?) partition? or even smaller??

Is the rest of the HD available in some manner?

Can a multiboot system save the day?