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Two tools I have found, sysrescuecd and DriveImage XML, have made the hard drive imaging process for me easier. The general concept of drive imaging is that a whole hard drive is copied into a file and stored elsewhere, for archival or backup purposes. Various options exist along the way such as FTP and compression.

What are the benefits of Drive Imaging?

If you are like me and re-fomat and install everything a few times a year, going through the drudge of that and updating a system, especially windows, can get tiresome. Drive imaging allows you to do that once, take a 'snapshot' of the drive, then when the time comes just copy over your image and voila, a new clean system!

SysRescueCD

I have included this method as it uses traditional linux tools all wrapped up in a convenient boot CD. I like these kind of tools as they are self contained and do exactly what is printed on the tin (a'la www.slax.org). The full link for the tutorial I used is here. Firstly download the iso image, burn to CD, then insert into your machine and boot from the CD (you may have to change BIOS settings).

Once into the command line, enter the following;

This command will try to auto detect your graphics hardware, it will ask for your keymap, I think it is 40 for UK. If yours is different, enter the number from the list. The CD will then boot into the GUI. You can at this stage use gParted to re-partition your hard drive, giving you space to save the image files onto. If you have ever used PartitionMagig or similar before then this should be failrly intuitive, if you have never done this before click here for a tutorial.

You now need to mount the partition. This will allow partimage to save data to it. You will need to know the path of the partition, get this from gParted's main window;

This will mount the partition /dev/hda2 under /mnt/windows. Next enter the followig to create a sub directory in the above partition to save the image files in;

mkdir /mnt/windows/winrestore

To start partimage type partimage on the command line. It will start m interface similar to the old MS-DOS soundblaster ones. Select the partition you would like to image, generally this will probably be /dev/hda1 but double check in gParted. Follow the screen instructions, F5 moves a step and generally you can leave stuff as default. You sill need to enter a 'Image file to create/use' enter

You will get a warning about experimental NTFS support, just click OK, you can also enter a memorable name for the image, use whatever you want.

Once done you can reboot the system, eject the CD (i just hit the reset button on the machine). Windows may run checkdisk as the main HD has been re-partitioned. To reinstate the image file(s) reboot eh sysrescuecd (assuming you place it in a safe place) and re-run partimage but select the option to 'Restore partition from an image file'. I cant provide any further detail as I havn't gotten around to doing this yet! The disadvantage of sysrescuecd is that to the best of my knowledge, you have to rebuild the partition from the image before being ablt to extract individual files, which may require a seperate computer.

DriveImage XML

This method uses a windows program that you run from the partition you want to image. It does this using the Volume Shadow Copy service which is built into windows. Download the exe from the link above and run the program from Windows. It is fairly easy to understand using a wizard style process. Follow the steps to create the image. For a 12GB size of files in a partition, I created it as one file, just for simplicity. The advantage of DriveImage XML is that you can browse the created image and extract individual files.