Thomas Heinrich said:
I am thinking about using DriveImage as a tool to backup my system
partition (C
I am planning to save the created image on the NTFS
partition D:
In general there would be enough space on this partition to place the
image on this partition beside the other stuff.
But: Need DriveImage a completely free/unused partition when it saves
the image? Does DriveImage - in other words - overwrite the contents
of a specified
backup partition (here: D
while it is saving the image?
Is NTFS as file structure of the backup partition a problem ?
Thx in advance
Thomas
DriveImage writes files so other files can coexist in the same
partition. It doesn't erase or format the drive/partition into which
you save the image file set. You might want to create a directory just
for the image files to keep them separate of other files on that
drive/partition. Putting image files on the same drive for which they
were made doesn't make sense. If you have partitioned a single drive
into C: and D: and the drive fails then you also lose your image files
on that drive. But if you're just interested in restoring your drive C:
to get Windows back to a known state with image files on D: then that's
okay. If you have 2 physically *separate* hard drives as C: and D: then
save the images of C: onto D: and images of D: onto C:.
Although Powerquest states that DriveImage will read files from an
NTFS-formatted partition, that depends on how you boot. If you boot
using their bootable floppies, that boots into DOS which cannot read
NTFS-formatted drives without using a driver (I don't recall if it
included one but probably does). I recall that when I booted using
their DOS bootable floppies and had DriveImage reading its image files
from an NTFS-formatted partition that it would sometimes get two thirds
the way through the restore and then complain that it couldn't find its
files that it was just reading a second ago. I've gone round and round
on this with Powerquest and they have noted that under certain
configurations (they will not clearly delineate) that reading from
NTFS-formatted partitions from their DOS bootable floppies may not work
reliably. So I created FAT32 partitions on each drive into which I save
the image files. They really need a mock restore where you can go
through the exact process of restoring a disk image but all it does is
read all of the image files to ensure it can read them completely and
without errors. In a way, you could do this by restoring the image to a
temporary partition created just for testing using the file system of
your choice. Once you confirm it works then you can return the disk
space allocated to that test partition back to another partition (pretty
easy if you use PartitionMagic). This problem existed under a prior
version of DriveImage and I haven't tested it since upgrading to the
latest version.
I also have Norton Ghost (as part of Norton Systemworks Pro). After
trialing it and contacting Symantec several times regarding deficiencies
and bugs, I went back to DriveImage. I actually wanted to use Ghost
because that's what they use at work albeit the enterprise version. But
I found DriveImage a better personal solution.
