Backup to CD & restore bootable diskettes?

[Dinosaur]

Are there any downloadable utilities which will copy bootable diskettes to a hard drive and later create new diskettes? Preferably free utilities. I am broke right now.

Aside from Windows startup diskettes, several of my applications create bootable rescue diskettes. I would like to backup all my bootable diskettes to a CD.

I also intend to create a Cd which archives all the DOS & Win3.x software I have. It seems a shame to just trash all those diskettes.

BTW: Considering the lack of modern programming tools, some of the old DOS software was incredible.

The better DOS software requires obsolete (but pretty good) ISA Graphics Controllers. I have not had a Motherboard with an ISA slot for a few years now. Many excellent applications will not run using more than 16 colors on a modern system. I suspect that most DOS software will not run at all on soon to be built systems.

I might buy or build a system with an ISA-Slot motherboard and play with some of the old DOS software. Has anybody been doing this? I think such motherboards are still available.

[david eaton]

Dimosaur
If you have a look at This site (http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/) , you will find all the info you want on how to create a bootable CD. Good idea to archive your old software DOs will rise again!!:D

David

[Budfred]

I think you can just create a folder for each floppy and copy the whole thing to the folder, make sure you have Windoze set to show hidden and system files first though. You can also download a nice variety of boot disks from www.bootdisk.com

Budfred

[mjc]

WinImage (http://www.winimage.com/) is what you are looking for, it will create a disk image of your floppy. It is a pay program, but it does have a 30 day (meaning 30 24 hours periods of use) free trial (one item that is disabled in the trial is creating the self extracting image), but it builds standard image files that can be used by many other programs.

One of the things I found about most other image prgromas is that they are not easy to use to build images, but will extract them with no problems. I use WinImage to build a library of disk images and then use another DOS based image utility to manipulate them (yes I am too darn cheap to buy something that I do not use more that often).

Try here for some great DOS utilities...

http://members.cox.net/dos/disk.htm#floppyutil

[mjc]

Just found this while looking for some new toys....hehe

Floppy2CD (http://www.judge-software.co.uk/) (on the products page)

The Installed Program Printer looks interesting too.