Free HD imaging utility?

Ocellaris

Ocellaris

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Jan 1, 2008
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I am looking for a free tool that will take a image of my HD after I install all of the OS updates, drivers, and activate Windows. Then I want to be able to deploy this at any time for a clean PC after I randomly bork something up. System specs are in my sig, I am running Vista Premium 64 bit.
 
If it's a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive, their drive installation software (SeaTools or MaxBlast) now has a stripped down but quite capable version of True Image built in, for free.

If it's some other brand of drive, then DriveImage XML as already mentioned is a great free option.
 
I got DriveImage XML working, creating a Vista 64 image on a fresh install + drivers was 14GB :eek: Thats with System Restore turned off too. I should check the swap file size before trying that again...
 
CloneZilla is free. Does good job of Disk-to-Disk copying... I've only used it on identical drives and never with images though, so can't exactly vouch for that.
 
If a clean installation + drivers came out to 14GB as an image, then you must not have enabled the compression features of making the image. There's just no way it would be that large if the compression features were enabled. Besides, drive imaging software is smart enough (at least the ones I use) to not add the pagefile or the hibernation file (if you have one) to the image when it's made.

Seems DriveImage XML offers up to roughly 40% compression which is ok I guess, but still not into the 2:1 or higher that other imaging software is capable of. Compression makes the backups restore faster, obviously, so if speed is a concern you may want to look into a better option instead of the freebies. As I stated before, if you have a Maxtor or Seagate drive, True Image is now part of their drive management software and worth using.

The recommended procedure for making a proper image of a system is:

1) Clear out all browser caches, delete all temp files from everywhere, etc. CCleaner is most excellent at this operation and can get rid of all that temp useless crap much faster in one action than doing it all separately.

2) If your system is working fine without issues, disable System Restore completely for 5 mins to get rid of all previous restore points, even after a clean installation because there will be several. After 5 mins, enable System Restore and make a restore point (if you use this stuff, of course). Personally, as I make daily images of my entire system partition, I really see no point in wasting resources (CPU time or disk space) with System Restore restore points. You're making backups of stuff that's being backed up by the system's own backup process. Does that make sense? Nope...

3) Defrag the drive with whatever tool you want.

4) Image that sucker and move on...

That's how I do it, myself. The first 3 steps take like 5 mins tops (running 2K3 x64, of course) and I don't have a hibernate file nor do I use System Restore (can be enabled in 2K3 with a hack but it's useless to me). The image is done in about 5-7 mins depending on what's on the system partition which is 35GB - anything more is a waste in my opinion, even with a Vista or 2K8 installation, but that's just me.

Oh, and my imaging software is True Image, of course.
 
I have a WD hard drive right now, however I was thinking about moving a spare Seagate 160GB EIDE drive into my system for backups. I might do that and try that latest SeaTools presuming that works as long as I have any Seagate drive in the PC.
 
I believe it might, I've never had anything but Seagates and Maxtors in this box of mine so I can't say for sure. It might only be functional for the Seagate, though. One way to find out, and when you do I'd be interested in knowing just for future reference, thanks.
 
another vote for clonezilla... i am still in the testing stage for it. i have tried two backups and both failed. but it was probably my fault for not having my samba share configured correctly (samba is not required, it is one of the options). or my HD may have been bad... Clonezilla told me to run Scandisk on the drive and try again.

ghostforlinux (g4l) is good too. you cannot depoly to a smaller drive -say you image an 80GB, you cannot deploy that image to a 40GB drive- NOTE ***I may be wrong about this and was unable to figure it out. you can push to an ftp server which is pretty cool.
 
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