1) XP-generated DOS start discette (neither xcopy or fdisk was included. I included xcopy by a search, copy and paste...)
Doesn't work for reasons stated above. WinXP does not have the xcopy, or any MS-DOS executable, designed to run on MS-DOS 8 (which is the version that ME identifies as).
2) DOS 5.0 start discette
3) DOS 6.22 start discette
DOS versions before Windows 95OSRB only understand FAT, and cannot read (without third party software) either FAT32 or NTFS partitions. These show up as "Non DOS" partitions and you cannot read them and they are not assigned drive letters.
In case 1) I got "cannot run this program in DOS mode"
The xcopy program you copied is a Windows 32-bit console application.
In case 2) & 3) I got "invalid drive specification"
Plain DOS does not understand FAT32 or NTFS, one of which (probably the latter) is the File system you are using.
I even tried to set c: as the active disk in the a: prompt but it echoed the same, i.e "invalid drive specification".
DOS cannot mount a drive whose filesystem it does not understand.
All I need is a working DOS program in a: which can run xcopy.exe c: e: /s
You are not going to find one.
And I have tried and tried to make this happen.
Some people define insanity as trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.
With regards to 2) & 3) I think the problem is NTFS. E: is formated in NTFS. The discettes are however formatted in FAT...
The problem is that NTFS is not understood by any of the boot disk versions of DOS. the ME version (DOS
understands FAT32, but none of them support NTFS and those appear to it as completely foreign partitions.
The problem with 2) & 3) got to have to do with wrong file formats. It is the only way a newbie like me can explain it.
Incorrect Filesystems, but yes.
The only way seems to be to move the disks to another computer, set both to Slave and use the (c:) xcopy from there.
That will not work either.
The problem here is that the so called MBR (Master Boot Record) will not be copied.
The problem is that the computer you connect it to will not have read access to a good portion of the drive. Due to the Access Control list. If you want to clone a drive,
use a tool designed for copying partitions, not copying files.
But if I reattach the larger disk to my original computer, I can run fdisk /mbr there generating a MBR on this system disk. Because I have understood, from Microsoft's homepage, that a MBR can only be created on the system disk (disk 0).
This won't work. You cannot access NTFS partitions from the boot disks you have. fdisk /mbr will only work on a mountable, formatted drive, and it will write a DOS MBR, rather than a Windows NT MBR.
Tomorrow I will check if fdisk.exe is available in my XP-DOS which I hope.
It's not. Windows NT uses "diskpart" for command prompt editing of partitions.
But let's hope I don't have to do it in this kind of complicated way.
You are the one insisting on doing so. As me and several others have said, there is software available for free that does exactly what you want. Instead of accomplishing your goal in a mere hour, however, your insistence on not using that software for ad-hoc reasons has left your problem unresolved for several days.
I do understand what you are doing- you are doing what you would have done with a DOS system. xcopy the drive with a sys command was usually enough to get it working. That is not the case. It hasn't overall become more complicated user-side if you use the proper tools.
