Problem solved!
Hey thanks for all of the replies. Actually I found the driver I needed - for those curious, its available at Download.com:
http://download.com.com/3000-2100-2937534.html?tag=lst-0-16
Just to explain why this is a useful thing to have for people on this board, here's what I am doing.
I'm a big fan of Symantec's Ghost program, which lets you create an entire image of your hard drive and save it as a file, or multiple spanned files. Its the quickest way to make a complete backup of your system, and by FAR the quickest way to restore a complete backup.
Ghost is essentially a DOS program. While you could run it in a DOS window of Win98 (and write a backup with your system up) it prefers to be run from a boot floppy. Under Windows XP you have no choice, as XP will not allow you to run Ghost at all inside the Windows OS.
When writing a backup with Ghost you have several compression options. The best case is you can get about 2:1 compression. If you are backing up volumes full of .WAV files you will be getting closer to 1:1 So a single CDR can hold 700 megs, about 1.4 gigs worth in the best case. Under Windows 98 it was easy to back up a system drive to one CD. But the software bloat of XP means multiple CDRs are needed.
On my own #1 PC at home, I'm already doing exactly what Mikedaul suggested. I have a 120 gig system drive, and a second 80 gig drive whose primary duty is just to hold a backup of the 120 drive. By keeping this backup refreshed, I'm completely protected from a drive failure - unless both drives and the entire PC explode at once. For that unlikely case, I write the images out to CDR. But that is a LOT of CDRs!
I also use Ghost at my day job, doing PC support. I watch over 350+ PCs of various makes. Ghost allows me to keep my sanity. I keep both Win 98 and Win XP images on a network so that when some dufuss accidentally erases his hard drive I can quickly restore it to its original pristine state, complete with installed applications. But I don't always have easy access to a network port, so I also keep CDRs with the most frequently used images. My Win XP images have grow to 4-5 CDs each, and each time I update them I need to toss out the old ones and burn new one. Multiply 4-5 CDs times the dozen or so different configurations I support, and that’s a lot of CDs. As most of our systems now have DVD drives, burning backups to DVD saves me a lot of time and hassle. By having a DOS DVD driver I can boot from floppy, run the Ghost program, and then access up to 4.7 gig worth of backup info from a single disc.
Now on newer systems I can sometimes just make a bootable DVD. But this doesn't always work right, because on some systems when you boot from a DVD it will map the DVD as C:, which then means the hard drive (the destination I'm trying to copy to) is unreachable.
So now that you know what I’m doing – what exactly does this mean to those of you reading this?
If you use a computer/DAW I always recommend having separate system and data drives. Keep just the OS and your applications on the system drive. Then use the second (preferable larger) data drive for your audio projects, data, and backups of the system drive. Periodically use Ghost or a similar program to back up the system drive, writing 690 meg “hunks” to the data drive. Then if you want greater security burn those 690 meg files to CDR and store them in a safe place.
If you have a single hard drive hosting both system and data, it gets harder. If you have a second PC and both systems have network cards, you can possibly make a boot floppy that will allow you to attach to the second computer.
With DVD projects becoming more common, and DVD burners and media rapidly falling in price, burning backups is becoming even easier. I still recommend keeping spanned backups files no larger than 670 meg (DOS can’t read files larger than 2 gig anyways), but you can fit your backup onto far fewer discs. If the worst happens and you lose the system, reconstruction is a snap. And with the Ghost Explorer program, you can extract individual files out of a Ghost backup much like WinZip lets you extract pieces out of a .Zip file.
