Text 1474, 58 rader
Skriven 2010-07-19 22:39:22 av Mike Luther (1:117/3001.0)
   Kommentar till text 1473 av Mike Tripp (1:382/61)
Ärende: Clone systems with USB stick?
=====================================
Thanks Mike ..


 MT> OK...your plain (stock commercial) DOS will have no knowledge of USB 
 MT> interfaces or devices attached to them, file systems 
 MT> other than FAT16, partitions larger than 2gb, etc.  If 
 MT> you kludge in third-party drivers or switch to one of 
 MT> the many modern extended open-source DOSes...you might 
 MT> be able to see the thumb drive as a hard drive and 
 MT> read/write a prepped stick, but you might not be able 
 MT> to use standard DOS utils like FDISK and FORMAT on it.

Dfsee comes with a create floppy service diskette that uses FreeDos with
whatever device drivers it likes to do this.  Carefully coordinated so that you
can do what it needs to do with the system you plug in the floppy and boot.  A
major vendor I've worked with for years for hardware and so on was STUNNED when
I brought in one of these Dfsee boot disks with DFSDOS on it.  We jammed it
into their 'super secure' Win XP master service laptop, jammed a USB drive box
on into it as well.  I booted it and could completely access their whole laptop
and clone it plus modify the hard disk in it, whatever!

 MT> Obviously you are addressing this
 MT> issue in some manner already, if you are successfully 
 MT> cloning to/from hard disk over USB now, but it must 
 MT> involve more than "plain DOS".

Yep .. courtesy of Jan and his work.

 MT> Your cloning exercise, of course,
 MT> would require ample support in both the source and 
 MT> target systems.

True ..

 MT> My guess is "probably so", depending on DOS 
 MT> functionality, BIOS support of USB mass storage 
 MT> devices in the machines involved, and application 
 MT> software design.<G>  It will take a paltry few bucks 
 MT> and a decent gob of manhours to know for sure.

Which I guess is now what I'll need to do. Buy one of these devices and see if
Dfsee 1.04 latest will see it jammed into a USB port on a ThinkPad or an Intel
915/945 mobo system and see if it sees the USB stick from a DOS boot.  If it
does, I'll try to simply clone the whole disk drive to that.  Then I'll take a
new SATA hard drive in that same box and see if I can reverse clone from the
USB stick to it and answer this question.

From the field .. a cow won't usually crunch what a cow can't munch. But you
sure better mow the fence line if you want the cow not to crunch it for nice
tall grass on the other side, grin!


--> Sleep well; OS/2's still awake! ;)

Mike @ 1:117/3001

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