I need to make a clone of a hard drive with a Windows 98 OS. My plan is to clone to an external hard drive. Is there a Symantec program that will do such a thing? Also, I'm a little naive about cloning. Once I clone, will I be able to operate programs on the external hard drive independently of the original HD?
The product you want to use is Ghost.
http://www.symantec.com/themes/theme.jsp?themeid=ghost
The current version does not support Windows 98, so you are going to have to find an older version on Ebay or other web retail site.
Best,
Thomas
The Ghost tool will create an image file of your hard disk in a (usually) compressed format. This image file can be restored to another hard disk should your original hard disk fail, or become corrupted.
There is no capability to execute the image separately directly from your external hard drive.
If you want to create an operational clone of your Win 98 system, you should look at virtual machine software - leading suppliers are VMWare and Microsoft Virtual PC.
It should be possible to clone the image of your Win98 system as a virtual machine image which can then be mounted as a virtual operating system. Note that the virtual environments provide virtual video CPU memory and sound drivers so these images are not easily restorable to physical hardware, so ultimately your choice of imaging or cloning should be determined by what your priorities are. Ghost is ideal for backup, virtual machines are more appropriate for cloning a working environment that you wish to run on another system in virtual mode.
Thanks, guys, that really helped. One more question, once I clone to an external hard drive can I "unclone" to a different computer such that the programs will work?
I know the old Ghostversion was able to clone Win 98 machines. The Vmware Converter could be a solution but I suggest to check the release notes : http://www.vmware.com/support/converter/doc/releasenotes_conv3.html
This extract gives some details about OS supported:
Support for the following guest operating systems is Experimental. VMware Converter 3 can clone source images containing these operating systems, but the destination virtual machine may or may not work without additional configuration after import. In particular, if the source image contains unsupported hardware, you may need to modify the configuration of the destination virtual machine before using it:
