Archiving workstation hard drives

[Zane H. Healy]

> OK, suppose you have a workstation and it has stuff installed on its
> drives.  You don't have the original distribution media for the OS and
> any installed applications and you don't have a spare system with the
> same stuff installed.
> 
> What's the best way to make a backup of the entire hard drive so that
> the essential software doesn't get lost?
> 
> The drives are SCSI.

If by workstation you mean Unix, I should think that hooking them up to a
more modern system with SCSI and using 'dd' to copy them to an image file
would be a good start.

Ideally though you're going to need to determine the model of HD, and get
some extras.  Basically you have a bad problem there, and should do the 'dd'
portion ASAP.

Mentioning the specific type of workstation and OS might allow some better
advice.

Zane