[Dreylivude]

Hello everyone. I just had to reformat, again, for reasons I won't get into. Just a run of bad luck I think. I was hoping someone would suggest a good, reliable, and simple imaging tool, so that if I ever have to reformat again, I could just wide the partition, and put the image back up. I'd also welcome some ideas on how to store the image, be it DVD, external drive, or what have you.

Thanks!

[Advertisements]

Hello everyone. I just had to reformat, again, for reasons I won't get into. Just a run of bad luck I think. I was hoping someone would suggest a good, reliable, and simple imaging tool, so that if I ever have to reformat again, I could just wide the partition, and put the image back up. I'd also welcome some ideas on how to store the image, be it DVD, external drive, or what have you.

Thanks!

Well, I use windows picture and fax viewer but you sound like a more serious picture editor than I am

I also use Advanced JPEG Compressor to compress files from my digital camera, IrfanView is also a choice for some people?
There's alot of possibilites, photoshop etc

And backing up onto DVD should be no problem unless you got kids around and they are going to get hold of the disc and scratch it or let the dog eat it :-)

Hope this helps

[Adrenalin]

Hello everyone. I just had to reformat, again, for reasons I won't get into. Just a run of bad luck I think. I was hoping someone would suggest a good, reliable, and simple imaging tool, so that if I ever have to reformat again, I could just wide the partition, and put the image back up. I'd also welcome some ideas on how to store the image, be it DVD, external drive, or what have you.

Thanks!

Well, I use windows picture and fax viewer but you sound like a more serious picture editor than I am

I also use Advanced JPEG Compressor to compress files from my digital camera, IrfanView is also a choice for some people?
There's alot of possibilites, photoshop etc

And backing up onto DVD should be no problem unless you got kids around and they are going to get hold of the disc and scratch it or let the dog eat it :-)

Hope this helps

[Dreylivude]

Thank you for the reply, but I believe you have the wrong idea. I'm not talking about images like jpegs, or bmps. I'm talking about making an image of my hard disk, for backup purposes. Something like Arconis, only I'd like something that's simple, and reliable.

[Neil Jones]

Norton Ghost is the best known program for doing this.
All you do is pick your source drive and tell it to copy ("make a ghost") it to another drive. This can be a separate internal drive, an external drive, even straight to DVD if you want.

[Dreylivude]

Ah, yes. Norton ghost. How well does it work with restoring the imaged drive? If I were to image my boot drive for example, would it be able to apply the image to that drive, with a boot disk if necessary? Because some programs say they cannot restore an image to a drive that is in use.

[Neil Jones]

The Norton CD is bootable.
So if you want to restore the image, boot off the Norton CD, have your source with your image to hand, start Ghost and use it then. It is exclusively a DOS based program. You can install it into Windows but it will insist on rebooting if you want to do anything with it from Windows.

[Dreylivude]

Ok, that sounds good. I'll look into getting that, thank you

[Tim_M]

I've tried a few over the years and the one I'm happiest with is Image For Windows (more info from here). It will image any partition to hard drive (internal or external), or direct to DVD. It will also image from within Windows. Extremely reliable and excellent value.

[sharlpero]

Why don't you like Acronis? I use it and like it very much. It is very simple and very very reliable. So, if you know it, why do you want to try another app.

[Dreylivude]

As I said I recently had to reformat again, and I had arconis installed, and had an image made, but when it came time to use it, it failed. The image would not restore. So I didn't find it very reliable.

[Neil Jones]

According to the [Acronis True Image] documentation, if the program needs to do a raw sector copy it will be limited in that it cannot compress, resize, incremental backup, or selective restore the particular file system. For other file systems only full backup and full restore are available, and when restoring to a new drive the restored partition will need to be exactly the same size as it was on the failed drive.

So in other words, if your 40Gb drive dies, Acronis won't restore your image unless you're restoring it to a 40Gb hard drive. This might explain why Dreylivude's restore operation didn't work if he or she had replaced the drive with a bigger one.

I'm not saying that Ghost is the best program for this sort of operation, its just the most well known example of such a program for the job. It was the first such drive imaging program and others (such as Acronis and Paragon DriveImage (later merged into Norton Ghost)) followed later.

[Dreylivude]

Well, I didn't change drives, I just wanted to re-image the partition, and it the system kept freezing up in the recovery procedure. I will try norton ghost, and perhaps Image for Windows, and see what happens.