i'm curious on how to make an image of my drive to a bootable cd. i want to reinstall my system with just the basics maybe the os with some updates then create an image onto cd. so if anything were to happen virus etc... i could save time and just run the image. i was able to do this before from one of my past jobs i didn't create the image but had a bootable floppy with ghost and an image on cd with the os and other programs winzip adobe etc...someone told me you could create an image using nero and use ghost to install from a bootable floppy or actually if you have the space on the same cd as well.

There are various applications that will do this - R-Drive Image, Acronis True Image and no doubt many more - a google search for "disk image software" should turn up more links than the mind can comfortable encompass :-)

If your going to create a disk image that you can rely on then don't bother screwin' around with Nero and other garbage... Get yourself a proper disk image program. There are many different types out but the best kinds are the ones that you can boot up and operate without the use of windows. People rely too much on windows to restore/backup/ghost, and what they find out in the end is that if you can't boot up windows then any backup or what ever that was made.... is useless. There are also image programs that allow you to save only occupied sectors as opposed to ALL sectors including the blank ones. This gives you a more compact disk image and is alot more flexible to different disk sizes should you want to install on a different drive.

I use Drive Image and back up the OS partition onto another drive. Drive Image runs from a CD. On one occassion everthing went to hell and instead of having to install everything from scratch I just laid the image back onto the appropriate drive and voila! everything was back the way it was before the crash.

I used to use drive image but the problem is that it copies the entire drive, empty sectors as well... so I ended up with a huge disk image... a great waste of space when you consider all the empty sectors. I now use savepart. It allows me to copy only ocupied sectors....not the entire drive. So my disk image is only as big as the actual info on the disk. It gives me a more compact image, and it also allows me to copy to HD's that are smaller than the one that I copied. It doesn't work very well with NTFS so you do have revert back FAT32

I use drive image for this. I find it to be very effective. This question has been asked before in this forum and you may be interested in reading about it. There is a sort of tutorial of how I do it in there as well. if you are interested, you can find it here. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Partimage fr knoppix(linux) is a good alternative & for free. I tested to make an image 20Gb Ntsf Xp system without any problem