Cloning a 486 hd to CF externally?

[nightanole]

I have a piece of industrial equipment that has a 486 in it. It just boots dos 6.22 to some kind of windows gui for running the machine.

I can take the 486 out and remove the ide hard drive. I can also get to its bios.

What i want to do is clone the 20+ year old install to a CF card or something similar. The original install floppies have long since become unreadable.

I have a few guides but most i cant do. For one i cant get to dos to use X copy etc, and i cant start from scratch from the install floppies.

Is there a way to clone (either bit for bit or xcopy like) the hard drive using a modern pc and a ide to usb adapter?

 

[IceDigger]

Any standard hdd cloning software should work. You just need adapters. I would just clone it to 2x or 3x ide drives just in case.

 

[Nate7311]

I've had to do this in the past on some old Telephony equipment. I used a 2.5" IDE-to-CF adapter and used Clonezilla without a hitch. If this is the ONLY copy of the software and it's mission critical, then I'd copy to multiple CF cards and keep 1 offsite.

 

[Trimlock]

I'd store an image file on a server somewhere.

 

[FnordMan]

Any standard hdd cloning software should work. You just need adapters. I would just clone it to 2x or 3x ide drives just in case.

Personally i'd clone it to a couple CF cards and an image on several DVDs if it's that important. Though if it really is that important an encrypted image "in the cloud" would also be prudent.