Free HD Imaging tools?

[bicostp]

I'm looking for a free tool to make hard drive images. Why? Because the kid who the school wants to get to replace me as in-house IT tech doesn't know his arsehole from his elbow when it comes to.. well... anything. He's concerned with viruses and spyware, yet he deletes Firefox, AVG, and Ad-Aware and installs this crappy-looking "AntiVir" program I've never heard of before. (I looked at the definitions file for it; AVG gets a LOT more.) Stupid kid...

It would likely be used on several different types of machines, so it really couldn't rely too heavily on disk sizes. It would include:

-XP Pro SP1 (with some modificatons to remove extraneous junk like MSN explorer and the XP Tour, and the removal of every IE shortcut )
- Office XP (Basic installation)
- Firefox 1.5.0.3 with AdBlock and Filterset.g)
- Ad-Aware SE
- AVG Antivirus

Any ideas?

[Kai]

HI
http://www.ascomp.net/index.php?php=pro ... upmaker.en
I don't really know if this backups the whole disk I some time ago downloaded it but then I bought Norton ghost 10.0 and I'm happy about spending the 49,99€

I've got AntiVir to I really like it but I also use windows defender, fsecure blacklight(because of rootkits) adaware and zonealarm

[vb_master]

Completely free and open souce, Image(n).

[Dark Savant0]

I would recommend DriveImage XML. www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

You can easily make an image with that (of course, you should write the image to another drive). Here are two remedies for botting the images back:

1. Place the drive into another functioning pc that has DriveImage XML. You can then just flash the drive back on. Take the drive out and put into the original computer.

2. You can make the image and burn it onto a BartPE ( www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ ) cd that contains the DriveImageXML plugin (on the runtime site) under a misc category. This works the best if the disc you use is a DVD, mainly because I think the base XP install is somewhere like 2 gigs, and will be more with all that extra stuff you want to fit.

You can also make an nLiteOS (www.nliteos.com/) dvd, and then configure it to have everything auto-install at first boot (so it would basically be a clean install with your software). There are guides to auto-installing and a whole forum for this kind of stuff, and the advantage to this is that the disk would not really on HD size at all. The disadvantage is that it MAY require a DVD, although you might be able to fit everything onto there by squeezing out some extraneous XP stuff. I stripped down XP SP1 once onto only around 300 mb, and since everything is compressed, you should be able to fit the rest of your stuff onto the empty space.

Good luck.

[blackbox_dev]

I'm looking for a free tool to make hard drive images. Why? Because the kid who the school wants to get to replace me as in-house IT tech doesn't know his arsehole from his elbow when it comes to.. well... anything. He's concerned with viruses and spyware, yet he deletes Firefox, AVG, and Ad-Aware and installs this crappy-looking "AntiVir" program I've never heard of before. (I looked at the definitions file for it; AVG gets a LOT more.) Stupid kid...

It would likely be used on several different types of machines, so it really couldn't rely too heavily on disk sizes. It would include:

-XP Pro SP1 (with some modificatons to remove extraneous junk like MSN explorer and the XP Tour, and the removal of every IE shortcut )
- Office XP (Basic installation)
- Firefox 1.5.0.3 with AdBlock and Filterset.g)
- Ad-Aware SE
- AVG Antivirus

Any ideas?

Wow, your lucky you get to be a computer IT guy at school. I was at my old elemtary school, I knew more then the teacher did. Hell, the teacher got me to do a mini course of programming in Visual Basic.

Now at my old school, the librarian does all the computer work. *sigh*

Does WinImage count? I think you can image partitions and stuff.