[macgyvr64]

Howdy folks, I'm interested in imaging my Windows XP install (from a home-built PC) to a safe location, and I'm running into some issues. My two old standbys, Ghost 2003 and Acronis True Image Workstation aren't going to come through in this situation:

1) I prepared a Ghost 2003 bootable floppy with network drive mapping, but my machine refuses to boot it, reporting "Remove disks or other media and restart". Tried multiple variations, with PC-DOS and MS-DOS all with the same result.

2) Acronis True Image Workstation kernel panics while loading up. To be sure, I ran memtest86 all day while I was at work, with no sign of bad RAM. Something about my Gigabyte motherboard being incompatible, perhaps? You'd think that would work, but it crashes every time.

Are there any other trusted bare-metal imaging utilities out there, preferably with network capabilities (SMB, FTP, whatever -- I can accommodate the app)? Thanks!

[ghporter]

DriveImage is a good alternative. You can even produce a bootable CD or DVD with network mapping so you can get at an image that's too big for a CD (or DVD). Better yet, you can get this functionality for free, starting with BartPE and adding the DI plugin. I've always been much more impressed by DriveImage than Ghost (and apparently so was Symantec, because they bought PowerQuest just to have the DI technology).

[macgyvr64]

Cool, thanks for the tip! I'll build a bootable BartPE CD with the plugin and see how well it goes :-)