raw disk copying?

Hi, Tom, *********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 24-Apr-06 at 22:29 Tom Uban wrote: <snippety> There exists dedicated software that is designed to do a bit-for-bit copy under such conditions. One of my favorites, mainly because it'll do a lot more than just copy, is SCSI Mechanic (yes, it'll work on IDE drives as well). Details on such may be found here: http://www.scsimechanic.com/ I've run it under Windows 2000 without any problems. If the OS can see the drives, SM should be able to work with them. File system and format are utterly irrelevant if you don't need to actually access the disks through Windows. Just as a recent example, I've used SM to make image file copies of the hard drives from several Telenex serial data analyzers, built in the mid-90's. They use a highly-customized Unix variant for their operating system. SM under W2K had no trouble at all creating bit-for-bit image files, or backup copies to another drive. There are other ways besides SM. I also own a dedicated hardware-level drive duplicator, and there are other software packages as well. Some examples are: http://www.drive-image.com/ http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ (though I will freely admit I'm not a big fan of Acronis products). There is a big list of free utilities at this link: http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml Happy hunting. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy, Blue Feather Technologies -- http://www.bluefeathertech.com kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m "If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with surreal ports?"