Best Drive Imaging Software?

[Darknyt]

Just did a reformat and have a nice squeaky clean drive (about 4.5gb total footprint). To more easily go back to a clean drive, I'd like to do a simple drive image for future restoration. I'm looking for recommendations for what software would be best.

Considerations
- It doesn't need to be fancy or complicated.
- I'm not doing incremental, scheduled or multiple images. Just once.
- I just want to be able to copy the image of my drive to my other harddrive
- I want to burn it to a DVD in a few weeks when I get my burner.

I've read some reviews of programs from Norton, Acronis, etc. I have the oem version of Nero 5, but the user manual says it can't create a working restore image of an XP installation.

Any ideas? I've even heard of a few free programs that sound workable.

[ToddRepp]

I'm rather fond of Ghost. I use it regularily to backup my system to DVDs. The newer versions support imaging to external USB drives also. Its not free but its worth the money.

[djnes]

Ghost has always been my favorite....especially the Corporate version. The only other contender was from PowerQuest, but Symantec bought them out....so there's no excuse not to use Ghost if you need a drive imaging.

[ameoba]

I don't know about locally but I tried using powerquest over the network


that was a mistake.


The software relies on win3.1 era DOS networking tools to put images on the network. I completely wrote it off when I saw that (and realized that all our servers are 2003 and no longer support that legacy crap).

I've never had a problem with ghost - you should probably be able to, once you've made your image, make a bootable DVD with the image on it. This would rock.

[ToddRepp]

I've never had a problem with ghost - you should probably be able to, once you've made your image, make a bootable DVD with the image on it. This would rock.
You don't need to make the image first. You can make the dvd a bootable restore disc from within ghost. You just need to supply a bootable floppy for it to get the boot disk image from when you do the backup. I normally do that when I do a fresh install on one of my machines. That way I can instantly restore my system with all my drivers already installed. Its much bquicker than having to reinstall everything.Just drop the disc in and go.

[bitbum]

My vote is for Ghost. I have been using the corp. version for 5 years without a hitch. The trick is making the boot disk, but the IT dept. makes those. I recently purchased the home edition that's bundled with a bunch of other utils, it's very good too.