Best free tool to image a Windows XP drive before reinstallation?

Usually I stay away from desktop support, but as I am marrying this one I don't think I can get out of it :)

Whats the best tool for taking a full, browsable image of a disk before a full reinstallation.

When I am doing corporate server support, I know where all the important stuff is on my machines - what can get backed up, what is transitory and can be discarded, and what will be recreated anyway. The same goes for my personal machines.

However, the cardinal rule for end user desktop support is 'they never answer anything fully and completely correctly', so I do not want to end up in a situation where she last lost important data because it was squirrelled away in some non-standard directory that she didnt inform me of.

Basically, I want a non-bootable copy of the entire disk 'as-is'. I could drag and drop, but is there a quicker way?

Cheers Richard

Solution 1:

Have a look at G4L (Ghost for Linux). A bootable Linux based package that will image Windows as well as Linux. It's will also perform all your partitioning tasks. All Open Source of course.

Solution 2:

Use a Windows PE-bootcd with ImageX, easy to create a compressed .wim from a single harddisk on another partition/removable storage and easy to restore with the same cd. With a single command you can mount (read-only or read-write) the .wim-file to a folder and browse/copy the content.

It's not too hard to create a dvd which restores your image with only a single keypress :)

Solution 3:

I would use VMWare Convertor 3.0 and do a P2V migration of it - then you have a bootable virtual image of the machine...

.. Ken

Solution 4:

Drive Snapshot, www.drivesnapshot.de. There's a free time limited evaluation available but even if you end up having to buy it the price is very reasonable. You can mount the snapshot file as a drive to browse it.

I've used Drive Snapshot extensively and done many restores of snapshots, and it has never let me down!

Solution 5:

Both DriveImage XML and Macrium Reflect are very good for whole image backups, there are also free versions! You can then mount the image and browse it, or if you need to, reimage it back to the disk by booting from cd/usb.