What's the best/easiest/cheapest way to create an image of a partition

[thirtythree]

My hard drive is currently set up with a 20 GB system partition and a 35 GB storage partition. I'd like to make an image of the system partition and store it on the storage partition (and, obviously, have a way of restoring it the system partition). I've never done anything of this sort before, so I don't know much about it.

Thanks!

EDIT: Ehh, perhaps this is the wrong section. You can move it if you want, mods.

 

[bupkus]

Norton Ghost?

 

[thirtythree]

Originally posted by: bupkus
Norton Ghost?

Hm, hadn't considered that. I just looked at programs on download.com. Norton's a little on the pricy side though ($70).

 

[Boztech]

First, with Ghost you'll need to store the image on a FAT32 partition to be able to restore from it.

Second, Ghost sucks. Check out True Image from www.acronis.com.

Third, is this storage partition dedicated to restoration images or does it contain other data? Because an image isn't compressed all that high and it looks like in your case the img file(s) will take up at least half of your storage partition. Just a heads up.

 

[Texun]

I've used Ghost and TrueImage. TrueImage gets my vote!

 

[trenchfoot]

Second, Ghost sucks. Check out True Image from www.acronis.com.

agreed. i lost some valuable data twice with ghost. however, TI 8 and 9 has never let me down. also, this app is very easy to use.
the only thing i don't like about it is you can't burn an image to dvd yet, only cd. instead, you'd have to create an image to hdd and then burn image to dvd from that.

 

[thirtythree]

Thanks, I'll take a look at TrueImage. As for the image taking up half my storage partition, I don't think this will be a problem because there's actually only 5-10 GB on the system partition. It's not likely I'll ever need more than 20 GB for storage anyway.

 

[dunkster]

Cheapest reliable solution would be Terabyte 'Image for DOS' @ $18.

Better (faster for image creation) would be Terabyte 'Image for Windows' + 'Image for DOS' combo @ $27.

I've used both for about a year, including 5 instances of restoring my Windows partition.

Good stuff!