Best Software for Cold Imaging

[d2thez]

I simply want the best software that allows me "cold image" my harddrive. In case the term cold image is lost on anybody, it is creating an image without booting into the host OS. How basically I want to boot from USB stick or optical disc and create an image of the local hard-drive and store it on a external USB hard drive.

In the end, I don't want to install any program on the OS itself to make this happen.

[evilghost]

Symantec Ghost or Acronis True Image

[AthlonXP1800]

Acronis True Image 10 Home is the best software I used to imaged my old laptop hard drive to a USB enclosure hard drive, it worked fantastic.

I tried Symantec Ghost first before Acronis True Image 10 Home but it is really very old program that now no longer work very well, it popped up with errors while in middle of created a image of my laptop hard drive on USB enclosure hard drive last year, I suggest you to avoided Symantec Ghost.

[Rakeesh]

Symantec Ghost or Acronis True Image

Whats wrong with dd? It's free and extremely easy to use. Just make a livecd or something and fire it up. Disk to disk, disk to file...whatever floats your boat, and zero limits as to what kind of data might be on that disk.

[evilghost]

Whats wrong with dd? It's free and extremely easy to use. Just make a livecd or something and fire it up. Disk to disk, disk to file...whatever floats your boat, and zero limits as to what kind of data might be on that disk.

dd depends on the disk geometry.

[Q]

I've used Ghost to image and deploy thousands of PCs.

That being said, Acronis might have better USB support for your specific situation.

[Slim Backwater]

Just registered to say that Symantec Ghost 12 can NOT do a cold image backup. I bought it just do this, and was suprised to learn that you can't boot off the CD and make a backup of your computer. That is how you do a restore though.

In addition, it can only be installed on a Windows XP machine, which made the product useless for me because I wanted to backup my Windows 2000 machine before upgrading to XP. Definately try the Arconis, or even dd.

I've used `dd` to image a drive to a file, copy that file to another linux box and mount that image so I can't understand the claim that it depends on disk geometry.

BTW, Ghost has apparently been this way for the last 4 editions, although there might have been a hack to get Ghost 10 to do it when booting off the CD, so if you can get an old copy you might be able to try it.