Re: Wanted: Freeware drive image/cloner

"Trevor Best" <newsreply@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4689667b$0$5857$da0feed9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Simon Finnigan wrote:
Hi all,
I`m just in the process of doing a clean install of Windows XP on a
laptop. It involves installing lots of drivers and other bits and pieces,
so once it`s finished I`d like to be able to create an image of the
drive, which I can then restore at any point in the future to end up with
the machine back in it`s original state. Freeware is good for this :-)

Ideally I`d like the program to let me create a boot CD/DVD of the image,
which I can boot from and it would then do everything itself, restoring
the machine. Failing that a hidden partition on the machine that is read
by a boot CD to restore the drive would be good.

Anyone got any suggestions for free software?

Would you like the Moon on a stick too sir? :-)

Maxtor's MaxBlast is a free verion of Acronis TruImage and will work as
long as you have either a Maxtor or Seagate drive in your system.
(many versions http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=maxblast)

PartImage is free but NTFS support is experimental, but then if you favour
free software why are you running XPee and not Linux anyway? :-)
http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page is stable on FAT/FAT32 though.

There are some of these sorts of utilities on the Ultimate Windows Boot CD
(http://www.ubcd4win.com/) I can't comment on them though, didn't exactly
look feature packed but then I wanted the facility to resize the
partitions while cloning, which none of the utils on there seemed to have
(unless the setting was hidden).

The only other free ones I know of require you to speak only in the
present tense and choose from eye patch, parrot on the shoulder or peg
leg, or mix and match, they're not mutually exclusive.

If you don`t ask then you don`t get. And I`ve often found that freeware
software is better than pirated software, in terms of legality, but more
importantly functionality. Thanks for those suggestions, i`m working on it
now :-)


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