ml> agreed there... i had to really dig and be creative the 
 ml> last time i had to rescue some data off of a XP laptop... 
 ml> i was finally able to get it to boot off of a FreeDOS 
 ml> (IIRC) floppy with NTFS drivers... then i had to really 
 ml> play around to get a cable together so that i could 
 ml> connect it between that laptop and one of my machines to 
 ml> zip (not pkzip) and/or laplink the data across... getting 
 ml> laplink to work was a real chore and as i recall, i ended 
 ml> up using a very old serial transfer program called zip... 
 ml> i believe it was out before laplink but i may be wrong on 
 ml> that... it allowed me to transfer the data at 115200 with 
 ml> validation to ensure that it was all correct on the 
 ml> receiving end... as i recall, i did use my laplink cable 
 ml> as one of the pieces of the total cable i had to come up 
 ml> with... it wasn't pretty and it took some time but it 
 ml> worked and that's what counted most ;)

 ML> I do read other echo areas, grin!

yes you do! :)

 ML> I wonder.  Why can't one just use the DFSEE utility to simply copy 
 ML> whatever you want this way by simply using it to boot the laptop 
 ML> from a floppy diskette.  Using the DOS rescue diskette that it 
 ML> creates.  In that way you get not only DOS, but the required 
 ML> drivers for USB and whatever. 

i've never used DFSEE in this manner, didn't know that it could, and, in
fact, have only used DFSEE two or three times and that simply for
diagnostics... other than that, i wanted/needed to work with tools that i
knew... especially since i was pulling from a client's machine and copying
to one of my own... there was an extreme need to not loose any information
on either machine ;)

 ML> Then you use this to 'clone' the hard drive to an external USB or
 ML> whatever hard drive needed.

didn't have one available...

 ML> From there you ought to be able to just 'attach' that cloned hard 
 ML> drive to another unit.  

didn't have one available... no available HD connections in the chosen one,
either... it sucks having to work with a live system and not have any spare
HDs to play with at times...

 ML> Either to clone the whole thing, or, as needed, using DFSEE to get 
 ML> the cloned drive attached to the other box to get whatever file 
 ML> data you want from it.

i'll have to remember this for the next time... i've never played with
DFSEE like this so...

 ML> I have successfully, as far as OS/2 has been concerned, to actually
 ML> clone an OS/2 Laptop into a fully bootable desktop system.  Of
 ML> course I have to be cautious to have the complete needed operating
 ML> system disk drive drivers in the OS/2 CONFIG.SYS file so that the
 ML> desktop will at least boot up.  As well, I have also been able to
 ML> reverse the process and clone a complete desktop system to a
 ML> laptop.  From which whatever device driver changes other than the
 ML> basic disk drivers can be changed to get audio - whatever, working
 ML> from there. 

yeah... i'm about to the point of re-doing my Warp 3 Connect setup... i
farkled it some time back applying an update that didn't offer a recovery
method and it blew out my netbios/netbeui/SMB stuff... not that i really
need that since i've been forced to use ftp to access the system from other
internal workstations... that's a bit tougher than simply copying a file to
Z: for instance... so i might be able to locate a drive so as to DFSEE
clone the current boot partition to and then install clean on that
partition... if it fails, at least i can get back, hopefully, to what i
have currently... again, hopefully without loosing any of the other
partitions or their data...

 ML> I have also easily been able to clone complete tools and things
 ML> that work at least in the needed operating systems between boxes
 ML> this way. True, I'd expect to have to use a Windows op system load
 ML> to see some things that were created as data on  Windows system on
 ML> an OS/2 box.  Or,perhaps interwork with Linux or whatever.  But I'd
 ML> guess this would be easier than going back to the old LapLink stuff
 ML> and so on.

yeah, but that was what i had at hand and i wasn't going to spend any $$$
trying to buy anything new for this one time application... i knew that zip
and/or laplink would do the job and i have old copied of them laying
around... the hardest part was getting a boot floppy that would work on
that laptop and allow me to see the ntfs stuff... that was all that i
needed... heck, i didn't have any way to read ntfs stuff anyway... no
machine here with that capability at that time... everything was win9x and
linux except for the one Warp 3 box... and i had to take the chance that my
main workstation would work as the receiver of the data since i didn't have
another that i might even come close to sacrificing...

also, this was several years ago... XP was not long out... maybe 2 years or
so... the whole problem stemmed from the client using her laptop while on
her bed... she didn't thinkg about the cooling intake vent being on the
bottom of the machine and since it was sitting on the covers, there was
very little cooling which caused the CPU to heat up and the machine would
shutdown or reboot or whatever... it never told her what the problem was or
why it shutdown or rebooted... it just did... after this going on for a
while, her registry was corrupted beyond repair and the software hive was
really toasted... she wanted to recover several gigs of family photos that
didn't exist anywhere else so i got the job... the filenames weren't the
same but that was ok because the photos were still intact... originally it
was going to be a "simple" recovery and then a reload of the OS
but that went south when i found that the cooling fan wasn't working... i
can only guess that the heat finally got to it and melted it enough to
disable it... they ended up sending it to the repair depot for that but i
could have done it as well... so they ended up spending 3x the $$$ for that
plus the reload than they needed... at least i got their data off and
burned to CD for them ;)

 ML> Which I have done and do still have here if needed.  And have used
 ML> on more than one trip to get data from one network environment to
 ML> another in the back a long ways past.

 ML> I guarantee you that DFSEE is a WONDERFUL tool set, especially
 ML> since the DOS created floppy boot diskette has all the needed tools
 ML> on it to get things so that you can see a lot of different drive
 ML> stuff as needed.

i'll definitely have to take a look at DFSEE for this... i don't suppose
the free version has all this capability, does it?? can it clone and expand
partitions as well? i had another problem on a machine where we cloned the
HD to a larger one and expanded the partition to fill the drive... that was
a FAT32 system and the problem was that while the partition expanded, the
cluster size remained at 4k instead of also being enlarged... this resulted
in defrag and scandisk not being able to run because there were simply too
many clusters and it couldn't count that high or some such... i forget what
we ended up doing, if anything... it may still be in play but is rarely
used after eventually acquiring another machine and moving the important
stuff to it...

 ML> My worst thing I still haven't gotten done yet here is to get a few
 ML> WordStar and early data files from the CP/M days from the old
 ML> HeathKit 5" and even 8" floppies exported to current DOS and OS/2
 ML> disk environments.

i can't say that i've ever had to recover anything from a CP/M box but i
did have a law firm that i sold new win9x workstations to with MSOffice on
them... they had their document templates on a wordprocessor that saved to
floppy... i was able to see the data on those floppies and copy it off...
then i wrote a conversion program in TP6 that converted them to plain text
format... then they could load them into word and fix them up as they
needed and save them for later use... once that was done, it was simply a
matter of loading them up and filling in the blanks like they had been
doing on the word processing machine :)

)\/(ark