Best way to Clone old Windows 95 and 98 Machines

[Dgoodale5]

I have a few computers at work running Windows 95, and Windows 98. I am trying to find some software similar to clonezilla, to take images of the machines, just in case a hard drive dies on me. The problem is, the hardware is so outdated, clonezilla uses too much of the resources, and will run out of memory. The recommended system memory for clonezilla is 192 Mb, all of the PC' s are way under that therefore it runs out of memory at various parts when I boot to the clonezilla disk. Does anybody know of any low resource software, that can take images on older machines like these. Or is there a way to setup a server, and have it do all of the heavy work, and just stream the image over the network.

Thanks for your help!

 

[USAFRet]

Possibly take the drives out, connect to a newer machine with a USB dock, and clone as needed.

 

[Eximo]

I'm assuming these are old enough to be IDE drives.

I have one similar to this that works most of the time:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002&cm_re=ide_to_sata_adapter-_-12-232-002-_-Product

 

[Dgoodale5]

I have one of those, but it honestly would be a pain to access each computers hard drive. Some of them are deeply embedded in old machines for manufacturing. Are there any other ways besides pulling the hard drive? Not to mention if there are any corrupted sectors, Windows might not be able to read the drive.

 

[USAFRet]

Maybe now is the time to start looking at replacing that old hardware. If that is original Win95 & 98, those are around 15 years old. Death could be right around the corner.

If the manufacturing machines rely on those OS's, possibly virtualization on newer hardware.

It may be a pain to either remove each drive and clone, or to completely replace the software stack.
But it will be far more of a pain when (not if) one or more of them dies at the wrong moment.

 

[Dgoodale5]

Honestly couldn't agree with you more. I have no pull here, so if it were up to me I would replace every single machine on the floor that is running anything earlier than XP, with something atleast running Windows 7. I will probably end up removing the hard drives and taking a base image of some sort from each machine, and then try to slowly upgrade them ( if they let me). Who knows maybe some of those machines would run on newer Operating Systems. It may be time comsuming, but it would be well worth it in the long run. Thanks for the help.