klapton

I haven't read all the messages in this thread, but I just wanted to chime in with my experiences with ImageX. I've been using ImageX for creating system images for over 3 years now with very few problems. I had been using Acronis, but ran into problems on certain hardware where I had to run a Non-ACPI version of Acronis in order for it to boot. And Acronis had difficulty backing up systems with heavily fragmented drives. The version of Ghost we used before that required DOS boot disks and drivers which was unsustainable. One of the reasons I chose ImageX is that it seemed a natural starting point for when I would eventually migrate to Windows Deployment Services. Plus, it's free. There are a couple issues with using ImageX. As has already been mentioned, it's not a disk imaging solution and you will therefore not be able to capture partition information. And I've found that it would fail to create an image if it encountered a file greater than 128 GB. (I was attempting to backup a disk with a SQL database file that was right at 200 GB. Workaround was to exclude the DB and copy it separately.) Also, I would avoid deleting then adding volume images from a WIM file. For my environment, I've created a bootable WinPE 3.0 (from the Windows 7 AIK) CD, a bootable USB thumb drive, as well as a PXE boot server for network boot. The PXE boot server is just a WinXP machine running tftpd32 to serve up DHCP and TFTP. The biggest advantage to running WinPE 3.0 is the vast hardware support. I haven't encountered a system yet that it couldn't boot and recognize the drives. Only once have I had to add a network driver that it didn't recognize. Let me know if you're interested in any specific setup details.

I think you'll find what you're looking for in the Microsoft Update Catalog.