I just bought a laptop off of ebay and it works great. however it did not come with restore cd's. the previous owner said he reinstalled everything. I just got done tweaking all my settings and such and im ready to start using it. What I want to do is create a disk image. I have heard of this before. basically I want to burn on DVD(file size) a copy of the entire used portion of the HD such that if the OS went kaput, I could simply drop the DVD in, turn on the pC and after a while, the whole this where its at as of rite now. I was reading around and what I have come up with is norton ghost or drive image? is that it? can a free utility do it?

Hello Squirrel, i have just purchased Norton Ghost 9, perfect for the job. Not cheap, but probably the best and easiest to use. It is just like explorer, you can drag and drop files once you have ghosted your hard drive. Norton Ghost 10 is out, presume it will be better than ver 9. Do a search on google, get it cheap. Norton Ghost 9 comes with Ghost version 3 inc, you could use that, but version 9 of Ghost is better i believe, very easy to use, no hassle, and the Installation disc is the Boot disc as well. Hope this helps, GEP

http://www.acronis.com

I use Drive Image 7.0 on my desktop and save an image of the OS partition on another hard drive. I usually reimage whenever I make major changes. It has save me more than once. Instead if starting a reinstall from scratch it takes you right back to the moment the image was made.

Norton Ghost, Drive Image or Acronis True Image woukd be my choices. None are free but all work very well. I use disk imaging all the time to a secondary hard drive. It is important to keep your image current then if your OS hits the wall, reimaging puts you right back in operation with little or no data loss. Saved my bacon many times.