Best Software For Taking An HDD Image?

[roadsweeper]

I'm looking to take a HDD image of a Windows 98 machine so that if the HDD fails the image can be written to the new HDD, the HDD fitted and the machine continue as normal. There are a number of reasons why other solutions (such as RAID, etc.) are not appropriate.

The most popular solution appears to be Norton 9.0 which I should be able to run on an XP machine with the HDD in question inserted as a slave drive. However, I wondered if people had any other recommendations?

Cheers.

roadie.

[tycho]

I have only ever used Norton Ghost which does exactly what it says on the tin. Very good product.

[TheExcession]

^what he said - Norton Ghost

[wingchundave]

Another vote for Ghost here. We tend to use it on quite a large scale and it's very good. A real saviour in times of imminent hdd failure too. Has the added bonus of a ghost explorer where you can extract individual files from an image if you need to.

[davidd]

I've had mixed results with ghost, ok for desktops but I've had problems with firewire and usb drivers in naitive mode. However

www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

is very good

D

[aldi]

Ghost 9 - you can mount the images as a drive letter... then share them out! supremely handy when you want to format a machine and copy things over.

[Zod]

Another vote for Acronis TrueImage

[roadsweeper]

Thanks all!

It looks like Ghost is the way forward though I'll take a look at the TrueImage product some time.

Thanks again.

roadie.

[-DeaDLocK-]

TrueImage is superb - no frills. Ghost is bloatware I reckon.

And if you want it nice and simple, with no frills but great functionality, get BootIt NG.