Hi all, Can anyone recommend a utility which will take a full image copy of a hard disk ? ... note that I am not talking about a file backup utility -- but one that will image the entire disk including hidden areas such as the boot sector. Something along the lines of what Acronis True Image does, but preferably freeware -- or at least a whole lot cheaper than the Acronis product. TIA. regards, Andrew

I don't know of any free ones out there, and had never heard of this one either. The two I have used are Ghost, and Drive Image. Unfortunately, they are both owned by Symantec now. They are both more expensive. The only reason I say unfortunate is the lack of competition to get better. Both are quite good.

Thanks. Do you know what are the differences between Ghost and Drive Image ?

I use Ghost. At the time I picked it up (2003) it would do NTFS drives which Drive Image didn't...as I recall. :-)

We've used Ghost at work, it's fairly reliable..

Are these DOS softwares ?

The big difference between Ghost and the latest version of Drive Image is that Drive Image can create an image while Windows is still running. Ghost boots out to DOS. Both products can save an image file to an external drive like USB, but sometimes Ghost can be finicky. On some systems it will see the USB or firewire drive and others it won't. Drive Image doesn't have this problem since it's backing up while windows is running. Ghost creates a floppy disk with USBfirewire support if you request it. You use the floppy disk to start your system if you need to recover. Drive Image uses the install CD to boot your system, so your system would need to be able to boot from a CD drive. You might be careful also if you buy Ghost online. If you just choose the download option, the program will install during the time of purchase. It doesn't let you download and save the files. You also have to pay $7 extra dollars so that you can re-download the product for up to a year. If you don't pay the $7, I think you can download for only a month. That means that if your system crashes after a year, you have to buy the product again. You do have the option to buy the CD and have it shipped instead. That seems to me to be the better choice since you could re-install it any time you needed to. But you do have to wait for them to ship it. They didn't give you the option to do both. But maybe this has changed since I bought it. But I don't think so. I saw someone complaining about this on the Symantec site and they told them if the needed a hard copy they should have bought it. Nice. Before Symantec bought Drive Image, they gave you the option of downloading and having a hardcopy shipped to you. Not sure if this has changed. With previous versions, I couldn't get Drive Image to work on my system. It would give me CRC errors when it booted to DOS and tried to run even though Check Disc would report nothing wrong with my system. But all that has changed now that Drive Image can backup right in windows. I currently like Drive Image the best for that reason. But I have never tried to restore an Image that Drive Image has saved this way. I did have to restore a Ghost Image once. I do wish Symantec didn't own them both. I don't like their practice mentioned about and I think competition is always health. But Symantec does seem to make good products. Well, that was probably more than you wanted to know and more than I intended to write. I'll shut up.

Thanks, MeInOhio. Useful and interesting information. But still not sure what is going to be best for me, I'll work it out, though.

I use CloneCD a lot...Its very reliable

Attached Link: http://www.xxcopy.com/

XXcopy is a free program that apparently can do this. Haven't tried it myself though. "Probably the most popular use of XXCOPY is as disk- cloning tool. It can duplicate an entire system drive that can boot Window 9X/ME (though not NT/2000/XP)." Seems like it is a DOS app, but it could be worth checking out I suppose. BTW here is a great page for all sorts of freeware: http://www.pricelessware.org/

To follow up a little bit on MeInOhio's post, I use Drive Image and have restored the system from an image created while windows was running. No problems. Also, you can boot from CD to create the image if necessary. ie, if you are running Linux you will need to go this route.

Jcleaver Drive Image needs something like passport.net or something like that to run. If you don't have it, the installer offers to install it. When I installed it on my HP computer, it told me that I needed passport. Then it reported that it couldn't install it because it was already installed. I thought "Great!" I was babying that computer because I've had a lot of trouble with my HP media center. Anyway, Drive Image completed the install and everything was fine. I just got a new computer - a Dell - and I want to install Drive Image on it. (I have a second copy that I bought just for this pc.) Just wondered - before I install it on my Dell - did anything like that happen to you? Thanks.

It does need the .net framework; but it does not need passport to the best of my knowledge. Pretty much any new software that was created with the newest Microsoft Visual Studio will require the .net framework. It should be safe to install; and sooner or later you will need it for something else.

I probably had it wrong. It was net framework, not passport that it wanted.