Is it better to turn off computer or power continuously to keep ancient 1990 harddrive alive (MSDOS 6.22 )

I want to extend the life of this harddrive as much as possible because I found it nearly impossible to clone.

It is running MSDOS 6.22. 110mb harddrive from 1990. The computer is only utilized 1 hour a day, 5 days a week.

If I want to keep it alive as long as possible, is it better to turn this computer off everyday or keep the computer powered on 24/7?

Thanks

Edit: I tried using dd_rescue and clonezilla to try to duplicate the contents of the harddrive, but no mater what I do, the harddrive never boots into msdos. I spent half a week trying to clone it.

I am not concerned about anything but the hard drive because it is irreplaceable unless I can manage to successfully clone it.

More info: The computer hardware is a modern early 2000's pentium 4 dell. Only the harddrive is ancient

Solution 1:

MS-DOS 6.22 should work under just about any VM software I know about. Is there something else special about this system necessitating it to be running besides MS-DOS? Have you tried imaging the drive and then creating a VM?

Is the problem that your hard drive is not recognized by the BIOS? You may need to set the hard drive to "TYPE AUTO" somewhere in the BIOS. It's possible that your hard drive is more or less "too new" for the system. There are also BIOS addressing limitations you may be running into, such as the 504(?)MB barrier or the 8GByte barrier. If the tools you are using the image are recreating the partition table, it may be doing something the old BIOS doesn't like.

MS-DOS fits easily on a standard 3.5" floopy. Back in the day, anyone who had to work with MS-DOS in such a capacity had a boot disk that would boot into MS-DOS and have a few very necessary recovery and install utilities, namely SYS (puts MS-DOS on a disk), FDISK (partitioner), and FORMAT, and then COMMAND.COM.

It's not overly difficult to covert a system that is booting off of C: to boot off of A: in MS-DOS, without modifying C: at all. The C: drive will be visible and accessible like normal. Basically you would make the boot disk with a SYS A: from a running MS-DOS system, copy over COMMAND.COM to the root of the floppy, and then copy and change CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT as needed. As long as your COMPSEC line in CONFIG.SYS doesn't point to A:, and your final line in AUTOEXEC.BAT is C: (to change current drive to C:), the floppy isn't needed or used after boot. This may be an option for you.

Solution 2:

Even though keeping the hard drive on will possibly extend the life of it since there are more read/writes at startup than at any other time. This will only extend it for a while but it might be that it'll die in two weeks instead of one.

That said, if the information stored in the hard drive is important and the cloning is difficult I would personally suggest you to get something like this and connect the hard-drive to another computer and use something like clonezilla or Acronis True Image to make a precise copy of the hard drive

Solution 3:

If you can read the drive (and it's not encrypted), you should be able to copy the data. Aside from any operating system files, and maybe some old applications that you can't reinstall any more, everything else is just data. You should be able to just copy the files manually.

As @MrJackV says, the least complicated way to copy things is to pull the drive out and attach it to another system using the device he suggests or a similar one like Vantec makes Newegg

Once the drive is connected as an external drive to another system, you can be sure that no files are locked or being updated, so you get a static (good) copy of your data.

If you don't have another machine handy, try getting an old version of DSL (Damn Small Linux) as a live CD and boot from that. It uses very little hardware, so it works on a lot of older equipment. Once you get that running, you can copy files or the whole image of a drive partition to any other drive that is connected to your system. Again, since the live cd is running (and not whatever OS you have on your main drive), you get a static copy of everything.