Thanks to all for the replies. brelfielfan - Could you provide more details, regards the settings etc. I've been unable to do what you suggest. I'm having a 7gb partition for WinXp which is having over 5gb of unused space. I used high compression and what I got was a 663mb file which is though compact is not bootable. firefoxthebomb - Will give Norton a try. And I did clean up the sys of all temp files, prefetch, offline pages, temp files, cache, etc, before I did the above mentioned image. And I'd even done a defrag to keep the files nice and tight. And I already have the restore option disabled on my pc. ner - That's just what I wanted to do, create a bootable Ghost image. Are you referring to Norton 2003 ?? EDIT - Seems like there is already a thread on this issue HERE. My apologies for not using the search option first.