SCO

Dear All,

I have a standalone desktop with SCO Openserver V 5, this is used to control a machine with custom written software. The problem is that the machine manufacturer has closed shop (bankruptcy) and there is no support on software.
As a precaution I would want to make a complete backup of the hard disk, so that my machine would run without any risk of data corruption/ hard disk crashes.

I am not at all familiar with this OS and would appreciate if someone could guide me in a baby way to make an exact copy of the loaded hard disk. There is no GUI on the OS and all inputs are entered through keyboard.

Assuming for the moment that the system has an IDE hard drive, the simplest way is to add a second IDE drive, and use Norton Ghost to duplicate the drive, by booting from a DOS/Win95/Win98 diskette. Do not attempt to change the partition size, as this function of Ghost is not supported.
If you have a SCSI system, then you can use the same process if:
1 you have a DOS driver for the SCSI host adapter,
2 you have a disk with the same number of heads and sectors per track.
3 you know how to install a scsi disk

There are ways to do this using SCO unix, read the installation manual about adding a second hard drive, run mkdev hd, but skip the divvy section, and use "dd" to copy /dev/hd0a to /dev/hd1a
You could also purchase Microlite Edge from Home of Microlite BackupEDGE / RecoverEDGE, and then use its backup and recovery features.

Dear jgt,

Thanks for your reply. Forgive me for my very basic understanding of computers. I would want to try the Norton Ghost option, as others are seemingly difficult for me to understand.

Yes the machine has an IDE drive with HTFS partition. The first step of booting with Win95/Win98 diskette is OK. How do we do the next step? from where do we run Norton Ghost?

Regards
Iqbal

Install the Symantec software onto a Windows PC, and copy the file ghostpe.exe onto the boot diskette that you made.
Then boot the unix system using this boot diskette, and then at the A: prompt start ghostpe.