Backup HPA on r40?

[depeo]

Hello!

I just got a Thinkpad r40 to tinker with, and maybe play some very old games.

I want to backup the HPA, so I followed the IBM pdf guide here:
https://thinkpads.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 480#p41480

I don't have a floppy drive and i'm not buying one just to backup the HPA, so I couldn't do the first two steps, but I found the fwrestore.exe/fwbackup.exe from a german thinkpad r40backup on archive.org.

So I tried running this in XP:
fwbackup size=2000 h:\imgset

h: is a network drive
size, I had no idea what to choose.

When running fwbackup, I get an error that the 16bit application requires direct level hw access and wont run.
So obviously I need to create a cd that boots ms dos, and run it from there, thats fine, But in ms dos, I have no where to store the recovery stuff. USB wont work, network drive may work if spend 2 weeks figuring out how get networking running in ms dos...?

I tried booting a linux cd initially, I thought I could just dd the entire drive from linux, but linux doesn't see the HPA at all.
Its set to normal in BIOS.

Any ideas how I can backup it?

[depeo]

I found some cd on winworldpc.com called DOS 7.1 from China DOS Union, that apparently contains support for fat32, so I will try to shrink c: and create a small fat32 partition and, and run fwbackup it from that dos 7.2 cd.

[depeo]

Ha! It worked.

For anyone else trying this:
1) Use Partition Magic 7.0 to shrink the c: partition(max 3.99 gb), then create a fat32 partiition in the empty space, and copy fwbackup.exe/fwrestor.exe to the new fat32 partition.
2( Boot a cd containing DOS 7.2 China DOS Union and run c:\fwbackup.exe 640 file=c:\imgset, and pray that the internal drive doesn't die!00
3) Boot into XP and copy the files to somehwere safe.

The size argument is the max size per file, with 640 every signle file fits on one cd each.
I'm uploading the files to archive.org now, but it takes forever.

[dr_st]

Thank you for the tips!

Does this China DOS Union build come with any special tools, or is it just a generic DOS stripped from Win9x? Because if it's just that, then you could also achieve the same with a Win98 SE CD.

[depeo]

Ah, yes, thats true! I didn't even think about that. A normal Windows 98 iso seems safer than something from "China DOS Union"

Thank you for the tips!

Does this China DOS Union build come with any special tools, or is it just a generic DOS stripped from Win9x? Because if it's just that, then you could also achieve the same with a Win98 SE CD.