Diskwright makes a complete, verified copy of the hard drive inside a 25–40 year old computer — no expertise required, and nothing on the old drive is ever changed.
Windows & macOS companion app · boots machines from 1986 to 2010 · free and open source
Diskwright is an early release (v0.9). Every claim on this page has been verified under emulation — real machines booted in software, captures compared byte-for-byte — but it has not yet been validated on physical old computers. The verification log records exactly what has been tested and what hasn't. Diskwright never writes to the drive it copies, which bounds the risk — but if a drive is failing or the data is truly irreplaceable, consider professional recovery first, and treat any new tool (this one included) with appropriate caution.
This software was written by an AI. Diskwright's code, tests, documentation and this website were produced by Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), directed and reviewed by a human maintainer. The extensive automated testing exists precisely because of that — verify, don't trust. The source is open for inspection.
The old drive is never written to. Not by a copy, not by a failed copy, not by pulling the plug halfway.
Every copy is read back and checked against its own checksums. “Finished” means checked against its own checksums — and in the automated test harnesses, proven byte-for-byte.
Each copy carries a plain-text RESTORE.txt: how to get everything back with free, standard tools. You never need Diskwright again.
How it works
The companion app writes a USB stick, floppy, or saves a CD image — and asks just one question: what kind of computer is it? A PC, a very old PC, or a Mac. It picks the right media for the machine on your desk.
A friendly full-screen wizard appears — even on a 486 — and describes every drive it finds in plain words: “appears to hold Windows 95, 98 or ME”. Time estimates are measured on the actual machine, shown before anything starts.
Onto the stick itself, an attached drive — or straight to your modern computer over one network cable. Type the six-digit code the companion shows, and the two machines find each other. No settings, no router, no internet.
Who it's for
Dad's photos and letters are on the Windows 98 machine in the spare room, and it still switches on — for now. Copy the whole drive before it doesn't.
The accounts, the customer records, the CAD files — still living on the one beige box nobody dares to turn off. Get a verified copy without touching what's there.
Every vintage machine you restore arrives with someone's history on its drive. Image it sector-by-sector first — DOS boxes, PowerPC Macs, the lot — then tinker freely.
Museums, universities and archives inherit hardware with irreplaceable contents. Complete, checksummed, documented images — restorable decades from now with ordinary tools.
Compatibility
Destinations: the boot stick itself, any attached drive, a network cable — or, for the machines that predate all of that, a printer-port or serial cable. Slow, honest about it, and it resumes if interrupted.
Why trust it
Automated harnesses boot every image in an emulator, run the whole wizard like a user would, and compare the copy byte-for-byte with the source. Every run is recorded in the verification log with the exact media's checksum.
MIT-licensed, and every third-party binary in the media is fetched against a SHA-256 pin. What's in the image is exactly what the build says is in the image.
Estimates are measured, failures say what to do next, and the wizard never claims success it hasn't verified. The twelve rules the interface is held to are enforced by tests.
The copy is a folder of ordinary files with checksums and a plain-text recovery guide. gzip, sha256sum and dd will still exist in twenty years. So will your data.
Honesty about the boundary: emulation proves the software; only real machines prove the hardware. The verification log shows exactly what has been tested where — and if you run Diskwright on a real old computer, report it (two minutes, working or not) and it becomes part of the record.
Questions
Be sceptical — that's the right instinct. In Diskwright's favour: the source drive is opened read-only, so the worst realistic outcome is a copy that fails its verification, not a damaged original; and the verification log shows precisely what has been proven where. Against it: it's new, AI-written, and not yet validated on real hardware. If the drive is healthy, there's no harm in also imaging it with an established tool and comparing. If the drive is failing, go to a professional first — that advice would be the same for any software.
No. The drive is opened read-only for everything except an explicit restore, and restoring demands a very deliberate confirmation. Powering the machine off mid-copy harms nothing — the copy resumes where it stopped.
No. You'll never see a device name, a mount point or a terminal unless you go looking. Every question is in plain English, and the recommended answer is marked.
Stop. Rhythmic clicking usually means mechanical failure, and every further power-on makes professional recovery harder. Diskwright's wizard says the same thing if it detects an unreadable drive — it will not grind a dying disk.
A folder named after the drive and the date: the raw contents in compressed, checksummed pieces, the drive's first sector kept verbatim, a manifest describing the hardware, and RESTORE.txt explaining recovery with standard tools.
PowerPC Macs (G3–G5) boot the Diskwright CD directly. Older 68k Macs can't boot modern software at all — the guide walks you through moving the drive to a machine that can, where the wizard recognises it as “from an old Mac” and copies it like any other.
It runs over one physical cable between two machines you can see, protected by the pairing code, for the length of one transfer. The old machine never touches your network or the internet.