Sigh - More XP Home Queries (SP Home)

[Dave]

Okay folks, I've rebuilt my home machine after last week's meltdown, reloaded XP compatible drivers for my external CD writer and scanner, bought Drive Image and loaded it, and sacrificed a chicken and danced naked around it at midnight.

I've made the rescue diskettes per Drive Image, However, the Drive Image program will not recognize my external CD writer, which is where I wanted to image my hard drive. At present, I've imaged it to another internal hard drive, but that strikes me as not the safest solution.

Following the Drive Image manual and last minute insert, I left a CD-R out of the writer until reboot commenced, and all other variations on that theme, but the DI program kept looking for disks in the A Drive.

Although I have some limited form of security now, I'd feel better with the drive imaged on external media - any suggestions from you knowledgeable folks?

[carbonnb]

Dave,

A couple of things spring to mind.

1 - Did you check the DI faq? According to the FAQ, if your CD is recognized under DOS (I am assuming they mean with loading the correct drivers in DOS) it should work with DI

2 - Did you check the DI Compatability list? According to the list, ANY CD that burns at 8x or better will work.

3 - IIRC, DI will let you set the size of the image. You could try and tell DI to use 650Mb images and then burn THOSE to the CD.

That's all that I can think of right now.

[Dave]

According to their FAQ, any CD burner faster burning at 8X or faster is okay, which I have.

It's been a while since I struggled with DOS commands - is there a quick way to see if DOS sees the burner - a dir command or something equally arcane?

[DaveA]

Most of the external burners are USB and DOS does NOT support USB. As Drive image states it does NOT support them.

Since you have a large hard drive, save the images to one of the partitions.
However the best thing to do is have a second hard drive installed and use it for the iamge storage.

[Dave]

I have indeed imaged the main hard drive to the secondary internal hard drive. I had just thought there might be some merit in having it on standalone (bootable?) external storage media like a CD-R.

My burner is in fact connected through the LPT port via a switch box which also has the scanner and older laser printer coming through it - should this change things with respect to DOS visibility?

[DaveA]

Could, but you will have to ADD the CD drivers to the "Drive Image" floppies.
I do NOT know if you can add the drivers, you will need to take a look at the "autoexe.bat" and "config.sys" files that are on floppy #1.

[carbonnb]

Since your writer is connected via the parallel port, you should be able to get DOS drivers from the manufacturer of the drive. I know Micro-Solution's Backpack CD-RW's have DOS drivers available.

If you use DI to create 650MB images, and burn those to CDs, and create the DI boot disk, you should be able to modify DIs boot disk to install the drivers when you boot.

IIRC, all disk 1 is is a boot disk. The actual DOS DI software is on disk 2. That should let you be able to read the CDs