asteroid
04-02-2006, 01:00 PM
USB devices in DOS cant be done right? wrong! with a little bit of messing around with a special boot CD with the right drivers it can be done, although something of a hack.
Spent ages at my work looking for a decent solution to reimage PCs using a Maxtor 80Gb USB external hard disk. We cant spend ages doing a reinstall of XP, then SP2 and then all apps it would just take too long, in many business environments you can install windows and all updates and applications and copy the whole drive to an image making reinstallation from that point quick and easy.
get yourself an ISO of this boot CD http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd75.html (you will need to do some detective work for the ISO using Google) version 7.0 I am using has Drive image 2002 and Ghost.
Using a machine with USB2 you can start off the cd and go through the menus, run drive image 2002 or ghost and your USB hard disk should be found straight away.
With an older USB1 machine you will need to chose one of the 6 different type of drivers, the 3rd one down Ive got to give the best results. Chose the USB DOS option in the menus, and you should have S: or something assigned to the USB drive. You can type M in DOS and get one of the nice dozens of utils to image or test your PC.
Do this at your own risk, Ive done dozens of images this way, but you will want to test putting the image back onto a spare hard disk set as C:. You must own a licenced version of Drive Image 2002 or Ghost as well as the CD to do this legally.
If you get any problems, leave a message on this thread, but first experiment with one of the other USB DOS drivers, or make sure your PCs have a upto date BIOS update, as some of the Dell machines we had crashed part way thru trying to load the DOS drivers, and new BIOS remedied this.
Spent ages at my work looking for a decent solution to reimage PCs using a Maxtor 80Gb USB external hard disk. We cant spend ages doing a reinstall of XP, then SP2 and then all apps it would just take too long, in many business environments you can install windows and all updates and applications and copy the whole drive to an image making reinstallation from that point quick and easy.
get yourself an ISO of this boot CD http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd75.html (you will need to do some detective work for the ISO using Google) version 7.0 I am using has Drive image 2002 and Ghost.
Using a machine with USB2 you can start off the cd and go through the menus, run drive image 2002 or ghost and your USB hard disk should be found straight away.
With an older USB1 machine you will need to chose one of the 6 different type of drivers, the 3rd one down Ive got to give the best results. Chose the USB DOS option in the menus, and you should have S: or something assigned to the USB drive. You can type M in DOS and get one of the nice dozens of utils to image or test your PC.
Do this at your own risk, Ive done dozens of images this way, but you will want to test putting the image back onto a spare hard disk set as C:. You must own a licenced version of Drive Image 2002 or Ghost as well as the CD to do this legally.
If you get any problems, leave a message on this thread, but first experiment with one of the other USB DOS drivers, or make sure your PCs have a upto date BIOS update, as some of the Dell machines we had crashed part way thru trying to load the DOS drivers, and new BIOS remedied this.