BOOTitNG (many tools in one). Been using it for years... hasn't let me down yet.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm

Maybe it was this thread.

John

I like XXCLONE. It is free and works well.

Dave T2

Acronis TrueImage. It's saved me from two crashed hard drives and a corrupted XP system disk over the last couple of years. Never an issue, can't recommend it any higher.

another vote for acrnois....

Acronis has worked really well for me. Version 11.

Ditto here for Acronis True Image...but version 8. Flawless to-date.

Heard of issues with later versions.

Used to have Acronis. Got tired of their response to problems with "sorry it will be fixed" (then you got to buy the upgrade to fix that problem ... but the upgrade had new problems. Switched to BING, Image 4 Windows etc as part of the package from terabyteunlimited. Have not looked back - has yet to let me down (unlike Acronis that several times reported the image was good but when I went to restore, gave fatal errors (the MD5 sums matched for the image files so they had not changed). Terabyte unlimited - small, not fancy but works great !!
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm

mikey

Another vote for Acronis. Have used it many times successfully from version 8 to 10.

"Switched to BING, Image 4 Windows etc as part of the package from terabyteunlimited. Have not looked back - has yet to let me down (unlike Acronis that several times reported the image was good but when I went to restore, gave fatal errors (the MD5 sums matched for the image files so they had not changed). Terabyte unlimited - small, not fancy but works great !!"

Yup.
The advantage to BOOTitNG (as well as other Terabyte unlimited products) over acronis is clear stability and dependability. But they also have a further advantage in that they operate completely independently from any OS. Your drive configuration (ie: C drive, D drive, E drive....etc) is stored within the registry of that OS. If your disk imager is independant from any OS then you can do things like install an imaged OS on another drive when it originated on C drive. That OS in turn will still think it's on C drive. The independence also gives you the ability to image ANYTHING.... mac... win3.1....etc. Of course with BOOTitNG you can also move, create, delete, restore partitions... set up drives with MORE than 4 primary partitions, edit your boot files.... and a whole host of other things. It's truly an all-in-one tool

Acronis on the other hand is slaved to windows so it can only image windows and it must respect the drive configuration that you have set up in your windows OS. Bear in mind though that there is a certain advantage to this too. Because Acronis is slaved to windows, you have the ability to create and reload PARTIAL images. Now personally I've never had any use for that... if you're going to create or reload an image then do it right and do it all the way... but then that's a matter of preference I guess.

Bink3times

I'm thinking about going with one of these as a replacement for Ghost 12 as ghost doesn't have my drivers for my add on RAID card and one other driver which I can't figure out what it is, so I'm worried it will not work in some situations - plus it's soon to be a dual boot machine which ghost doesn't support either - The RAID card is a 965SE 3 Ware.

Is there anyway to check prior to purchase if the drivers required are in there (or maybe with the approach they aren't needed)?

I don't have a lot of experience with RAID... (try to avoid it), but I will say that BNG functions as an independent system and simply copies/compresses what ever it sees on the drive. So I would suspect as long as you have your RAID drivers in then BNG will work fine. It does have a trial... so download and try.

One note however... when you use it as a trial, you don't have to install it. Download it from the site, burn it to disk and then reboot on that disk. It will ask you if you want to install, press no, and that will take you straight into a basic maintenance mode screen for disk imaging and other things.

One other thing.... BNG is IDEAL for dual, triple, quadruple... etc boot systems. I have dual boot (2 versions of vista). I installed vista on c drive, did a disk image, then took that image and simply copied it to D drive. Installed BNG and it allows me to select which system I want to boot.

When you install BNG... it's the first thing that boots up. This allows you to go straight to maintenance... or select which system you want to boot to. It will even allow you to boot from usb. Because it's the first thing to boot up, it comes with password protection as well as user protection so you can keep things secure if you wish

EDIT: Just looked at the BNG knowledge base:

"Will BootIt NG Work with My RAID or ATA66/100/etc. Controller?"
"Yes, as long as the attached hard drives are mapped in the BIOS, and the BIOS can be used to access them. "

Hmmm - I see that it will work if it's recognized in the BIOS - however the RAID Card has it's own BIOS loaded after the board BIOS is loaded - I'll try the trial on a CD and see if it can see my OS RAID drive on the 3ware card.

So when booting up after being installed it's the first thing that boots and you can't change that?

Do you have to enter a key stroke when it boots to continue or will it time out and continue to boot on a predetermined path?

With BING you can set the "wait" time before it continues -- if you have it set to "0", it will wait for you to select what to do next. If you have it set to some other time (like 8 seconds), at the end of that time it will boot into whatever you have set as the default boot partition. When you initially install it, the default wait is "0" (wait for you to tell it what to do), but it is simple to change.

mikey

I've had problems with commercial products (mainly the old Power Quest Drive Image, which became Ghost), so I switched to the free (open source) BartPE. I've restored many times, never one problem when I do it from the boot CD that it guided me to create - instead of trying to create image/restore from within Windows. One disadvantage: not able to restore a single file (if I need that, I restore to an old junk hard disk, get the file onto a thumb drive from it, and copy it to wherever I need it). However, I rarely need a single file as all of my created files go on other disks, which are continuously backed up with Second Copy.

OK, some help with BING please,

I have a boot disk made from the download file - booted and didn't install went to maintenance and partition work - I have 2 RAID arrays - and it shows i have 2 disks - the disk 0 on my 3Ware Raid card shows only 2 partitions - one with the OS and one I created to load another OS on - the third data Partiion doesn't show - I have the 'show all partitions' box checked on settings. I have USB mouse checked when I created the disk but the wireless USB Mouse doesn't work - I can't figure out how to check the box by Disk1 to show the partitions on the other RAID Array - but it does show the array as a drive - disk1. Is there a way to see data only partitions in this mode? Is there a way to check the Box for the other HDD using the keyboard?

For some reason I couldn't create a CD - just a floppy - the CD made fine but then when trying to boot from it I kept getting the message that the EMBRL was missing?

Thanks in advance for the help - this looks like it may well be what I want to use - just some bugs to sort through in this trial verion.

Again... I can't be much help with RAID. I will say though that I have the Intel XBX2 mobo which has an INTERNAL secondary sata controller... I'm not running RAID but none the less I can see all drives on that controller. Of course it's internal to the mobo which means it can be seen and manipulated at the BIOS level.

And yes... I have mouse issues as well. I had an older mouse which worked fine, but when I upgraded the mouse, I had to start getting used to keyboard control. A bit of a pain, but you do get used to it.

Not sure why you had issues with a CD. I run on CD without issure (EMBRL is Extended Master Boot Record Log. BNG puts an extended mbr on all your drives so any boot that comes from bios or anything else gets redirected to BNG..... EMBRL will also allow you to label your drives and other little extras at the BNG level). You only need EMBR if you are actually installing it to your system. You don't need embr if you are simply going to maintenance mode.

I can't help much with RAID either (the only RAID I use comes in a can and works well on the hornet nests :-) ). There is a message about EMBRL that comes up when you run from a CD, but it also says something about "don't worry if you are running from a CD" or something like that. Two very good places for additional information on the Terabyte stuff is in their knowledge base (online) and their newsgroups. If you have a news reader, you can simply set it up to read their newsgroups - lots of good info there on all of their applications and the author of the program is very good about answering questions in the newsgroups (although he can be a bit terse ). Check out the KB and the newsgroups - lots of people doing lots of different things with their tools. Check out this link:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/support-bootit-next-generation.htm


mikey

well I figured out the keyboard instead of mouse routine - I'll have to do some looking on the newsgroups for teh EMBRL missing when I boot from CD - it won't even get past the first prompt after the DMI loading list on boot. I was able to find my other RAID array and it shows the data partition on it, as well as the one on my single HDD back up disk.

Thanks for the help guys.

Great suggestions, thank you all.

I had tried using DriveImage 2003 and it seemed to work, but when I tried to restore several OS images to disk, the machine would not boot from the restored images.

Is there something i need to do to a new or used sata disk to make it a bootable disk? and wouldn't anything i do get erased anyway when i restored the image of my original OS disk?

Or should I just go out and get Acronis?

BTW, I'm looking at the Acronis site and cant' figure out if the software will simply create an image of my OS disk and let me restore it to another disc.

I would want the 2nd disc actually to boot my machine and function exactly as my original disk did before whatever disaster required the swap.

I'm not sure if I'm seeing that function of the site, but maybe i just need to shift paradigms . . .

You will have to set your bios to show that new OS disk as the first disk to boot from or you will probably get NTLDR not found message. Or you can move it to the location that the old OS disk was - either old SATA port or PATA just y unplugging both drives and swap the plugs for data.