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I bought a zip drive with the hopes of being able to back up my entire hard drive onto zip disks. This is no problem, the drive comes with some software that will do this for you. It is even handy to use. But wait a minute! How do I restore? Well, run the restore program in Windows 95 and you've got it made.
I don't know if your mind raised any flags but mine certainly did. Zip tools are made to work in Windows 3.11 and Windows 95. What is the purpose of a backup? To keep your data safe and be able to restore it when your drive crashes. I don't know about you, but when my hard drive crashes very hard, Windows 95 certainly isn't there. How am I going to restore then? I am very dissappointed in Iomega for not providing software that will restore from Dos mode. I can boot to a floppy and be in Dos in an instant, but do I have to reformat (probably), reinstall Windows and install the zip software, just to be able to restore Windows 95 and all my files??? That sounds odd to me. Iomega really should have provided Dos software, but they didn't.
I set out to find a way to be able to restore a volume without having to reinstall Windows to my hard disk first. In the end, it would be about as easy to just do it, but I had fun along the way.
I decided I was going to install Windows onto a zip disk and then boot to it. This would probably be easier with an IDE zip drive. Mine is a parallel one. Part of my goal was to be able to take this to any computer and do this since I work part time as a computer tech and sometimes need to restore volumes.
I am assuming that the hard disk of any computer I am traveling to with this setup is crashed or has some error. Therefore all of the files I need and all the stuff I am going to use wil have to be toted by me. I will have to have a 100% self-sufficient setup. This means, for one thing, I should do an installation of Windows directly onto the Zip drive.
Of course, when you connect your zip drive, it is always going to get a drive letter of at least D or later. The hard disk gets its letter before the zip even gets the chance. This is important because is going to boot up off of the C drive. The C drive is going to have to be the zip drive.
I installed Windows directly to the zip drive. I disabled the hard drive in the Bios, then used my boot floppy to initialize my cd drive and manually assigned it a letter such as D. Next, the guest.exe program assigned the zip drive letter C since that was the first available letter. From there I proceeded to install Windows.
This takes a little longer over a parallel port than IDE, but it wasn't the worst thing I have ever waited on. I think installation took about an hour, perhaps less. All went well, except that at the very end of setup, when it is ready to restart the computer, I got some strange unexpected error message and that I should retry setup. I basically ignored this and continued. In hindsight, I would guess that was something with creating the registry file, but am not sure. (I will explain this later.)
Recall that my hard drive is disabled. That would be rather useless since the goal is to restore files. I want the hard drive enabled, and I want the zip drive to be C. In theory this is not possible unless perhaps you try to make guest assign the zip as letter C (guest.exe letter=C) but this is not advised in the help files and anyway, what if I want to restore C?
The solution: The hard drive will be enabled AND the zip drive will be C.
Anyone who does some gaming, or anyone who has just been around a little, has probably heard of a program called FakeCd. You can download it.
This program was designed with the intent to fool Dos into thinking that a certain directory on your hard drive was actually a drive letter on your computer. Suppose your CD drive is slow and you want better performance by having it on your hard drive. You copy the contents of the game CD onto your hard disk and put it into the C:\Games directory. Your game is going to look at drive F: for the game CD. FakeCd is a bridge, or faking program that will make a reference to F: actually go to C:\Games. Of course you can fake any directory to any drive letter. I had never heard of it used for purposes like mine, but thought I'd give it a try.
For my purposes, I assigned the zip drive to be letter Q at startup. This was all on my boot floppy. I chose Q since it was a letter far from the beginning of the alphabet. This way I took the least chance of the zip drive letter colliding with a pre-existing letter on the computer. What I needed to do was make Q be C. I used FakeCd to make Q into C. (fakecd Q: /L:C)
By doing this, I will effectively make the real C invisible and unaccessible for the session. Therefore, before I made Q=C, I made C into something else. In my case, I redirected C as drive X.
The older versions of FakeCd could load only one copy of itself into memory. The version I used (1.0c) is newer and you can load multiple instances of it into memory with the /multi switch.
So far my autoexec.bat file looks like this:
A:\Guest letter=Q
Fakecd /multi C: /L:X
Fakecd /multi Q: /L:C
I worked on the registry part first. I did solve the problem but can't say for certain what it was. I am fairly sure though. I began by adding a path statement in the autoexec that pointed to C:\Windows where the registry resides. This didn't help.
I noted that just before this error, the computer was reading the A drive. I developed a theory that since I had booted from A, when Windows began to load, it looked at the boot source for the registry files. The boot source is A. Since it wasn't on A (and couldn't be copied there, it's too big) it just gave up. This was probably closely related to the XMS message too.
After some thinking, I decided FakeCd would again bail me out. At the end of the autoexec, I would make the A drive actually become the C drive. (Fakecd /multi Q: /L:A) What do you know, it worked!
Remember the problem with VFAT? Well the registry thing is gone, but VFAT still haunts me. I had never heard of this before. I did some research and saw that it has to do with long filenames and stuff, but didn't get much farther. I posted to the Usenet and got a reply. He got the information from Microsoft.com. Here is an edited copy of the source. VFAT errors
I tried the first cause/solution and that fixed the problem. I opened A:\Config.sys and added the line Device=C:\Windows\Ifshlp.sys to it. This worked. Rember that it is not referencing Device=
So now I have done it. It didn't happen quite so fast as you can read about it, but I did get it to go without too much trouble.
Windows doesn't load quite as fast over a parallel interface. Keep in mind that IDE is many times faster. It takes about 4 and a half minutes on my computer (Cyrix P-166+, 32 megs) for the screen to show the Windows shell. About a minute after that and Windows is done loading. Everything else runs slower of course, but it is bearable if you are patient. I thought it was probably like a 486/33 maybe DX2/66 with 16 megs or ram.
Windows installation took about 75 megs on the disk. I later installed zip tools onto it. I came up with a problem. Zip tools would say you need a zip drive to use this. When I ran Guest95, nothing happened, no adapters could be found. It seemed that if you booted to it, it could not detect itself. I did overcome this by installing a SCSI adapter.
I did this under Control Panel, and add new hardware. I manually selected "SCSI Controllers" and pointed to the zip setup disk. The guest.ini file has the info you need. (I had to have a copy of the disk on the hard drive or zip drive since the last line of autoexec rendered A unaccessible.) After that I chose parallel interface. From there I ran guest again and it worked.
Now that I have the drive installed, I can run restore. You can run it from the zip disk as long as it has 15 megs free. This gets a little tight by the time all that stuff is on there. Restore asks for the last disk of your backup set. Put that in and click ok. Go on to the next step, and your computer freaks out. In continuing the program, it just looked for Windows on the C drive and it was gone! Swap the disks. Put in the Windows one again and click whatever it wants. Now put the backup one in as needed. You may need to swap these a few times.
When you get the blue screen that says, insert disk into drive Q with label xxxx, do NOT press the esc key. When you do, Windows will try to abort and will still try to read from Windows. When it can't, you'll get a fatal exception error and you will have to reboot right there. Your other option is to press enter. Do this only after you have inserted the correct disk. Failure to press this with the correct disk can also lead to a fatal exception error from which you cannot pass go or collect $200, but must go directly to a reboot.
Sometimes when you want to take out the backup disk set and put in the operating system disk, you can press the eject button and the darn thing won't eject. Ha ha, very funny. The only way around this that I have found, is to disconnect the power from the zip drive, and reconnect it. Press eject again and you can have the disk. Put in the OS disk until its happy, then replace it with the backup disk again. This is fun.
Don't change the internal label on the zip disk while you are running Windows from the disk. Doing so will make Windows panic and ask for the disk with the correct label. You can't proceed at all until you do. This means you can't even change the label back. Change it only from within normal Windows.
The impossible can sometimes be done. I wasn't told this was impossible, but then again, I never asked anyone before I did it, but I'm sure someone from Radio Shack would have loved to tell me it wouldn't work. The sky is the limit for what you can do if you want to. (Actually the limit is higher than that) Use some imagination. I see no reason why the same can't be done with Windows 3.11 too.
For questions or anything else relevant, email Acclaim@geocities.com
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