Hey all, I've seen a few other posts on imaging software (like the one from Iceman that is stickied), but they don't really help me with my specific solution, and I'm wondering if anyone can save me a ton of research and experimentation.

I need an imaging software that will just do the following for me:

I have a tech machine that I use as a "server" for lack of a better phrase.

I want to be able to plug an HDD into that machine, and then image that HDD.

I then want to be able to do one of two things with that image.

a ) Store it as a backup.

b ) put that image on a new HDD either the same size, or larger, or even a different brand.

I would prefer to be able to do this from within Windows. But I can deal with doing it from a prompt or some other CD/DVD based installation, as long as I can store the images on an NTFS partion. I don't want to have a dozen 8GB FAT32 partitions on the box, just to store images.

If I've left out something I need to consider in the above scenario, please let me know as well.

Thank you in advance.

Edited February 6, 200818 yr by Wrayth

If you have a seagate or maxtor drive, discwizard or maxblast are free to download, cut down versions of acronis trueimage 10.

Will those work with any other manufacturer's drives?

Or should I just look at Acronis? Will it do what I need?

I'm not too worried about cost, I can buy the software as needed, I just need a solution that will work for me.

Perhaps DriveImageXL from Runsoft or Drive SnapShot www.drivesnapshot.de would be could free or lost cost imaging utilities to do what you want.

If you do this a lot, you might want to consider a hardware hard drive duplicator rather than doing it in software. It's much, much faster and independent of what's on the hard disk. However, it doesn't make a backup, just duplicates a drive from one to another. If you want to use software to make image files from the disk, any imaging package should work from a PE boot disk.

Ghost should do just what you want but from a boot disk either Dos or Windows PE.

Acronis TrueImage is the only product I know of that will work on a running system to image it.

Image for Windows, Paragon Drive Backup, and Shadow Protect can all do a backup while in Windows iirc.