imaging Windows 2000 fat32 partition?

[monto]

wondering what software to use in a backup image. i tried Ghost 6.5 some time ago, right when it came out, but after some crashes, i tried to revert to that "fresh install" Win2000 image, but found there were security errors with pagefile aka swap file. after many tries i gave up and reformatted. recently, a fellow on the other Anandtech boards recommended Drive Image 4.0, and i've managed to make an image, but have yet to try it out.

wondering if any folks have experience/advice in this situation. by the way, i'm single booting off a ~3gb fat32 partition.

 

[Bozo]

Drive Image 4 works great with FAT32 file systems.

Bozo

 

[TomBilliodeaux]

I have both Drive Image 4.0 and NGhost 6.5. I have used both to image and restore W2k partition o/s.

My findings are that Both will work ok with Single W2k o/s partition, restoring to FAT32.
Problems will arise with W2k if you have changed partition sizes or numbers/letters, especially if you are installing a NTFS image to NTFS partition.

W2k reconciles info from the mbr and its registry files concerning partition data. If it has changed since last boot up, and W2k did not register the change, problems occur.

With Drive Image,problems booting up can be solved by running from pure dos, "FDISK /MBR" after your restore is complete.
But this did not work if I installed using DI to NTFS.

I did not have any problem with Norton Ghost 6.5 (assuming you have a good image clone). I recently restored my 2.4G W2k NTFS partition to a new partition while keeping the source partiton, thus having 2 copies of W2k, one as a spare.
To do this, I had to follow MS's instruction to change the drive letter assignment in the registry to the same as what the original source was in order to get all the software and drivers to work just as the clone did. Must Hide the source to do this or change the source to a different drive letter than its original.
Have not worked this out yet fully. This is only a problem with NTFS, not FAT32.

 

[monto]

thanks Bozo and Tom-the NTFS tips will be useful if i decide to reformat

i'm about to try this DI4 image by reverting it on a different drive-so as to not format my current well-working configuration. would there be problems in partition size because the imaged partition was 3gb and the new drive is 5gb? this is all fat32, by the way.

 

[RalfHutter]

There won't be any problems restoring an image to a different size partition than it was created on/from (at least in fat32- I do this all the time). Drive Image resizes the partition as necessary. Not sure about NTFS-I'm more careful here and only restore my NTFS images to the same size partition, but sometimes on different brands/types of HDDs. Everything works fine. A tip-after you create an image, boot back into Windows and use the "Drive Image File Editor" to verify that your image was created correctly. I've had a (very) few images show up as "corrupt" when I tried to run them. Better to find out right after you created them, (so you can try again) rather then later when you REALLY need them.

 

[monto]

thanks Ralf, will verify