Image of HDD with OS/2 How?

I work in a manufacturing setting. My company has a system that is run by a rack of cards (input, output, communication) with the OS being OS/2. We would like to be able to image this hard drive, so that in case of failure we can R&R the hard drive and get back to work.

Most imaging software that I have found requires the drive to be installed on the machine (not connected USB etc..)

In the past the HDD has been sent out and an image created. The company that we used has since gone out of business.

Keep in mind, we have no intention of installing any type of software on this system/HDD. We just want to be able to create an image.

I guess I am asking for two things.

1. A software suggestion/instructions that I could possibly run from a Windows machine that would allow me to image the HDD sector by sector. bit by bit.

2. A recommendation of a company that would be able to achieve this for us.

we use acronis for all our imaging needs. you can simply take out the hdd, stick it in a machine, boot from the acronis live cd, then image the hdd from there.

Sand Man,

So you are saying that my fears of the HDD being an OS/2 are unfounded and that by booting from the CD will remove the fear of dealing with Windows.

Are the options for sector to sector or bit to bit available?

to be honest, i have no clue. give them a call and they can help you with it more.

Is the disk FAT or HPFS (OS/2's filesystem)?

In the first case, you should be able to run it on any machine, if it's HPFS, it will also be possible, but you'll need to install the drivers on the windows machine. Have a look here to see how.

Once you can read the disk, you can use anything you want to mirror it.

An alternative setup would be to get a PCI RAID card and a second disk of similar size, and build a RAID 1 array. A proper RAID card should be able to do this for any old OS without drivers, regardless of OS (by hooking into Interrupts 13 and 19, iirc).

FYI, if acronis can't determine the partition type, it will do a bit by bit image a la 'dd' - can't really go wrong with acronis, even when it takes forever in a situation like that, but what wouldn't?

When it comes to cloning operating systems there nothing easier, faster and better than using Linux Live CD.

Just download any one. It comes as an iso file. Burn the image on a CD and you are in business. If I have to recommend one then try Slax or Ubuntu.

You can hook up the target disk as an internal disk, external disk, USB, firewire or eSata.

This is the write-up

Linux dd reads the binary pattern of the source hard disk and duplicates the information on the target disk. It is a 100% mirror image of the original. As no file is read so any operating system can be cloned. All you need is to get the target disk exactly the same size (exact number of sectors) or just larger.

dd starts from the first sector and only terminates when the last sector has been exhausted. The cloning is done at a hardware level and whether the disk/partitions are mounted or not is immaterial.

The whole operation involves just one line of command. Life doesn't get simpler or easier than that. It is absolutely free too and you actually can understand how it is done (if you read about it)!

The only bad part about 'dd' is that it does not only image "taken space" - you get 100% size of partition/drive that is cloned.. though I did mention dd, I do not recommend using it.

It is true that dd copies the empty space faithfully as it copies the real data but it runs at a hardware level with the maximum access speed.

On a Sata partition of say 100Gb the speed I recorded could exceed 70Mb/s. Cloning a 500Gb took 2.26 hours at 61.4Mb/s. Cloning software like Ghost also copies the empty space too and can take longer.

If one of the disks is attached to a USB connection the speed can drop below 20Mb/s.

dd has one important asset that no operating system copying function can do. It copies the boot sector plus the non-file section of the partition. Thus the clone boots exactly like the original. Most file copying commands cannot access the boot sector of the filing indexing section of the partition.

dd only copies the sectors of the hard disk and as such all PC operating systems can be successfully cloned. dd doesn't know what the operating system inside, how many of them or whether the disk is good or bad. It simply reproduce a mirror image of it.

One should not look at dd as an all rounder command because it never is one. It is one of the most basic Bash commands that allow a user to get even a single byte out of a hard disk at any location. One can however use it to good effect for making backups.

XP and Vista can be backup/cloned by dd without the need of a re-activation.

Ya, acronis does the same thing ... only better - as it does not take all the 'free space' with the image - it does however give you access to said free space later. I suggest you check it out