Old Thrashbarg
Veteran Member
My actual question is pretty simple, but first I should probably give a bit of background to fully explain the rather unusual situation I'm facing. I recently got an HP Internet Advisor... one of those network analyzer laptops. It contains all sorts of specialized hardware related to the network functions, but at the core it's basically a regular 486 system, running Windows 95.
One of my first acts after getting the machine was to take an image of the hard drive. It didn't come with any of the install disks or anything, nor do I know where to get them, so the only copy I have of the specialized software is the existing installation on the drive... a quite old drive which is making noises a drive shouldn't normally make. :-o
The BIOS has a 528MB limit, as one would expect on a 486. The existing hard drive is apparently a later replacement... it's an 800MB drive, but only 528MB of it is being used, in a single partition.
What I would like to do is replace the hard drive with a flash drive, I'm thinking either a DOM or an industrial CF. I could use a 512MB card to stay under the BIOS limit, but the problem is that free space is already a bit tight... there's only about 30MB free on the existing partition, and though the imaging software will allow me to resize it down to fit on a 512MB drive, that would leave hardly any free space. So I pretty much need to put a larger drive in there. A 1 or 2GB drive would be plenty. Obviously there's not any simple way of adding an XT-IDE universal BIOS or anything of that sort, so my only other option for using a larger drive is an overlay software. But this is the part where I get stumped:
I've used drive overlays before, but it was quite a few years ago, and I've only ever set it up on blank drives, and then created partitions and installed an OS. That's the standard procedure, and the only one that's mentioned in any of the documentation I've been able to find for such software. But in this case I'm not going to be installing an OS... I need to restore an existing partition from a disk image. Is there any way to make that work? Or is there perhaps a simpler solution that I'm overlooking?
One of my first acts after getting the machine was to take an image of the hard drive. It didn't come with any of the install disks or anything, nor do I know where to get them, so the only copy I have of the specialized software is the existing installation on the drive... a quite old drive which is making noises a drive shouldn't normally make. :-o
The BIOS has a 528MB limit, as one would expect on a 486. The existing hard drive is apparently a later replacement... it's an 800MB drive, but only 528MB of it is being used, in a single partition.
What I would like to do is replace the hard drive with a flash drive, I'm thinking either a DOM or an industrial CF. I could use a 512MB card to stay under the BIOS limit, but the problem is that free space is already a bit tight... there's only about 30MB free on the existing partition, and though the imaging software will allow me to resize it down to fit on a 512MB drive, that would leave hardly any free space. So I pretty much need to put a larger drive in there. A 1 or 2GB drive would be plenty. Obviously there's not any simple way of adding an XT-IDE universal BIOS or anything of that sort, so my only other option for using a larger drive is an overlay software. But this is the part where I get stumped:
I've used drive overlays before, but it was quite a few years ago, and I've only ever set it up on blank drives, and then created partitions and installed an OS. That's the standard procedure, and the only one that's mentioned in any of the documentation I've been able to find for such software. But in this case I'm not going to be installing an OS... I need to restore an existing partition from a disk image. Is there any way to make that work? Or is there perhaps a simpler solution that I'm overlooking?