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I'm trying to preserve some old bootable floppy disk by trying to clone it to a hard drive (disk C:) to run on the same hardware. (Important note: The hardware shall remain the same. I cannot use a VM or another computer!)

In the current configuration this computer doesn't have a hard drive (but I can add one via a 34-pin ribbon cable.) At the moment computer boots directly off of this floppy, but I can change it to boot from disk C in BIOS.

Here's the contents of the floppy disk (obtained using WinImage):

enter image description here

It appears to be booting into:

Windows Millennium [Version 4.90.3000]

I tried multiple disk cloning tools available online but all of them don't seem to take floppy as a source drive and HDD as a destination.

Any ideas how to do this?

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  • I hightly doubt a straight clone of the floppy image the the HD will work. I would be more tempted to install FreeDOS onto your hard drive, then simply copy the rest of the files on the floppy to the hard drive. BTW, what kind of hard drive do you have that will work with a 34pin ribbon cable? Perhaps you mean 40 pin?
    – Zoredache
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 23:53
  • @Zoredache: Well, it might've been a 40-pin. It's an old style flat/ribbon type connector. The hard drive is from my old XP machine. So I'm curious, if I can clone one HDD to another HDD (of different original size) why can't I do the same with a floppy disk?
    – c00000fd
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 0:02
  • sevenforums.com/general-discussion/…
    – Moab
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 0:50
  • You can clone a floppy to another floppy, and you could clone a floppy to a HD, just not sure it would actually boot and run. If you wanted to test just boot a Linux system and do something like dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hda replacing /dev/fd0 and /dev/hda with the block devices for your floppy and hard drive.
    – Zoredache
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 3:14
  • @Zoredache: You know, I'm pretty new to Linux. Can you give some more details in an answer? (Which linux, where to get it, steps to copy floppy to hdd.)
    – c00000fd
    Commented Mar 25, 2016 at 6:40

1 Answer 1

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You need to make a partition of say 50Mb in FAT32 at your HDD.

Then download an image of Millenium Bootable Disk without RAMDrive from HERE

Extract sys.com utility from this image and write to your floppy.

Boot from your floppy and enter the following command to make HDD bootable and transfer system files to it:

sys.com C:

Then you can copy all content of your floppy to HDD.

That's all.

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  • Thanks. Just tried it. Unfortunately when I call that copied sys.com C: from the floppy when I boot off of it, it gives me: Cannot find the system file in the standard locations on drive C:. SYS can only be used on drive C: to attempt a repair of already existing installation of Windows. Use Windows SETUP to make drive C: bootable.
    – c00000fd
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 21:35
  • And if I run Windows SETUP from the original bootable Windows ME CD it simply installs Windows ME on that HDD. Any ideas how to trick sys to work?
    – c00000fd
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 21:36
  • OK. I managed to trick sys c: to say "system transferred" by following this: proposedsolution.com/solutions/… I basically created this folder C:\windows\command\ebd, then removed read-only, system, and hidden file attributes from the original A:\io.sys and copied it to C:\windows\command\ebd and renamed it to winboot.sys. I then copied the rest of the files as copy a:\*.* C: but unfortunately when I removed this floppy and booted to HDD it gave me strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility
    – c00000fd
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 22:14
  • Hmm, my recipe worked for pure MS-DOS... Everything is much more complicated in case of Millenium.
    – Oleg Bolden
    Commented Mar 25, 2016 at 7:50

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