Thread: What's the best Disk Imaging Software

What is the best Disk Imaging Software ? I never created a ghost file (image) but the one that came on my computer is too incomplete, meaning if I want to totally reformat my hard drive,I hit the control button and tap on f11 at boot to access this ghost image that is on my hard drive.

It work's great but I want one where I don't have to install the drivers,updates,etc... (programs) ... and one that doesn't take 5 hours.

I never actually made this ghost file or image before and I have been told to use Norton ghost 2003. Is there anything better ? I want my reformatting to take 15 minutes instead of 5 hours.. lol

Thank you in advance.

I use Symantec (Parent company of Norton) Ghost at both work and home and find it to be the best for imaging, but it does take a little know how. What kind of system are you working with?

You will need to create a boot disk so that you can boot into Ghost and then image to an external drive or a different internal drive than the one you are attempting to copy. Getting the Ghost boot disc can be the tricky part as you the disc needs to be able to control your ethernet card.

As far as the boot disc goes, I would suggest either downloading one of the BartPE or UBCD4Win editions floating around the web that have Ghost integrated. There's a million of them on Demonoid.

If you need a more technical walkthrough just let me know. I boot into ghost an average of 50 times a week >=]

The one I will be doing this to is a Dell laptop/windows xp professional (NTFS) and only one hard drive. The only storage I have with me is DVD-R's and a couple of flash drives.

I really don't know how this works but from what you wrote,I gather that I need to create (burn) a boot disk on a CD or DVD-r so I can, "boot into ghost ?" Not sure what that means, but I understand that I need to copy the drive I want to copy, onto another drive. I do appreciate any advise or instruction you can give me.

EDIT: Now, can that be a flash drive or a DVD that I can work with to copy the drive I want to make an image of or do I need a hard disk/external drive ?

On my mac I use SuperDuper with Time Machine, however on windows I generally despise Norton products. I would check out Acronis True Image.

I saw Acronis True Image as a good one in a review. What don't you like about Norton ? Just curious ..

And are there any freeware versions that are good ?

What brand are your drives? Seagate and WD both have their own imaging apps which are essentially True Image clones. I am told Paragon has a free version that is ok. But you might already have an imaging program installed on your computer...Windows Backup (not to be confused with system restore)!

I find all Norton products generally bloated and resource hogs. As well, I've twice had Norton Ghost images fail on me on recovery with no real good reason. Luckily, with some sneaky handywork, I was able to recover some (but not all) of the data from the image.

Originally Posted by aliceinchain

The one I will be doing this to is a Dell laptop/windows xp professional (NTFS) and only one hard drive. The only storage I have with me is DVD-R's and a couple of flash drives.

That complicates things. Generally speaking, the data on your laptops hard drive is going to be far larger than will fit on a CD/DVD or flash drive. If you are truly looking to go this route, based on your setup I would recommend that you buy an external HD that is larger than your laptop's current HD.

Perhaps I should clarify what your intent is. Are you looking to have just a backup of your important files or are you looking to create an image of your entire computer that can be restored in the event of a failure?

Originally Posted by aliceinchain

I really don't know how this works but from what you wrote,I gather that I need to create (burn) a boot disk on a CD or DVD-r so I can, "boot into ghost ?" Not sure what that means, but I understand that I need to copy the drive I want to copy, onto another drive. I do appreciate any advise or instruction you can give me.

You are correct in the assumption that you would have to boot into Ghost. If you are trying to make an image of your entire OS, you will need to do this as many of the files that you would be trying to copy would be locked when you are logged into Windows. So you get a boot disc, put it in your CD-ROM, restart the computer, and use your BIOS boot menu to boot from CD (normally you hit F10 or TAB or something similar while seeing the BIOS logo to see this menu). This will load a version of Windows that runs off CD so that you have full permission to access all of the files on your HD. From here you would execute Ghost and tell it to copy from one drive to another. Once again - if all you have is DVD's and a flash drive this probably isn't going to work for you. I would definitely suggest an external for this application.

When finished, this would give you an exact copy of everything on your computer from today. If your machine ever crashed, you would be able to boot back into the cd mentioned above and copy the information in reverse - from your backup hard drive to your main drive. Once complete this would allow you to boot into Windows as it was today.

Hope this helps to clarify. If this is still the avenue you want to pursue let me know.. there are a ton of guides out there and I can find you a good one so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel.

The Acronis software is really sexy.
Here I can backup all my C: with about 15gb with a fresh 7 install to a 9gb file and I can recover it with 20min, everything installed and perfectly configured.

You should give it a go.
Good luck.

Originally Posted by Magnolia Fan

I use Symantec (Parent company of Norton) Ghost at both work and home and find it to be the best for imaging, but it does take a little know how. What kind of system are you working with?

You will need to create a boot disk so that you can boot into Ghost and then image to an external drive or a different internal drive than the one you are attempting to copy. Getting the Ghost boot disc can be the tricky part as you the disc needs to be able to control your ethernet card.

As far as the boot disc goes, I would suggest either downloading one of the BartPE or UBCD4Win editions floating around the web that have Ghost integrated. There's a million of them on Demonoid.

If you need a more technical walkthrough just let me know. I boot into ghost an average of 50 times a week >=]

I agree with this post. I work in IT, and use Ghost on a boot disk every day. You can even configure it to map networked drives (assuming you have loaded the nic drivers) so you can map it to network storage. I have Ghost servers that I image to, which are automatically mapped by a script on startup.