way off topic....OS2 hpfs imaging

[Ben Scott]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Ken Campbell <kcampbell at conval.edu> wrote:
> Does anyone have a pointer to some s/w that will image hpfs drive?

  I think you're going to be limited to creating a raw, block-by-block
image of the disk, as Tom B suggests.  The only products I know of
which supported HPFS filesystem-aware imaging were Ghost and
PowerQuest Drive Image.  Symantec bought both and turned both into
crap; HPFS support is long gone.

  A raw image is just as good a backup as a filesystem-aware image;
it's just less efficient because it includes even "empty" blocks.  A
filesystem-aware image will skip empty blocks, which can often save a
lot of space.  If it's like a lot of old voice mail systems, the disk
is tiny by modern standards, so this may not be a big deal.  I know
the HD in our old Norstar Applications Module (which ran OS/2) was
like 250 megabytes.

  So put the disk in a Linux system, and "dd if=/dev/voice-mail-disk
of=/path/to/some/file.img".  ("if" is "input file"; "of" is "output
file".)  Don't get the arguments backwards -- some versions of dd will
happily overwrite your voice mail system's disk with an empty file.

  You can usually improve speed quite a bit by specifying a block size
that's a large multiple of 512.  For example, "bs=512000".  On IDE
disks it don't change anything to use larger blocks.  (Magnetic tape
is another story.)

-- Ben