Product Reviews

Disk-imaging tools are becoming increasingly popular as they have a number of useful applications. Upgrading to a new hard disk can be simplified by copying an image of your old drive to the new one and most products will also allow you to resize partitions. I regularly use imaging tools to load fresh copies of different operating systems onto test PCs and servers in a fraction of the time it would take to install them manually. Along with Symantec's Norton Ghost, Drive Image is one of the top disk-imaging utilities and PowerQuest has added some useful new features to these latest versions.

Two options are available - Drive Image is aimed at single users while the Pro version targets support departments, as it includes features such as IP multicasting for deploying images to multiple clients simultaneously across a network. A new feature in both versions is the ability to write images directly to CD-R and CD-RW media. Drive Image supports IDE, SCSI and ATAPI drives, but not USB, parallel and PC Card versions. Other new features include an image-size estimator; support for image creation on hidden FAT, FAT32 and NTFS partitions; and an image integrity checker.

Drive Image must be run on systems booted into DOS as it requires exclusive access to the hard disks. A number of extra utilities are installed in Windows and one will create a rescue disk set for you. The first is a DOS boot disk, which loads all the appropriate device drivers, while the second contains the Drive Image program. Although the utility offers to copy across drivers for devices such as SCSI and Iomega drives, the startup files may need editing and the manual is not overly forthcoming with hints and tips. In the end, I found it easier to create my own DOS boot disk, copy the Drive Image executable to another floppy and run it manually. Furthermore, CD-R and CD-RW drives will require the supplied PQPACKET executable loaded before Drive Image, otherwise it won't recognise these drives.

The Drive Image interface is simple to use and offers three options for creating or restoring images and copying images from one drive to another in the same PC. To create an image you select a drive and partitions, pick

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a destination and choose a compression level of up to fifty per cent. Norton Ghost offers similar levels of compression, but I have experienced a number of failures when trying to restore compressed Ghost images and recent experience has shown that Drive Image is more reliable. Unfortunately, Drive Image threw up some different problems during testing with a TEAC CD-55R SCSI drive, as it would only recognise it as a CD-ROM drive. Accordingly, it could not be used for writing images to. I discussed this with PowerQuest's technical support, which advised me that my TEAC drive was an older model that was not MMC-2 (multimedia command set) compliant. Most new drives should support this, although no certified device list was available on PowerQuest's Web site - so it would be wise to check your drive specifications first.

When restoring images, you can select a Safe Mode that checks the hard disk to ensure data is being written to it correctly. You can also resize the destination partitions to fit or leave Drive Image to modify them automatically to take up any remaining space. You can peer inside image files to view their contents using the Image Editor utility; copy other partitions to new or existing image files and restore individual files or directories to selected destinations.

The PowerCast feature in Drive Image Pro will be of interest to support departments as it uses Ethernet multicasting to send an image file to one or more clients simultaneously. One system runs the PowerCast Server which can be from DOS or Windows, although the latter method must be on a network with a DHCP server. A fair amount of work needs to be done first as each client requires a unique boot disk with the appropriate network components installed. Fortunately, a boot-disk builder utility is provided which eases this process. The server can be set to start broadcasting as soon as a specific number of clients have logged on and it displays the IP address of each client along with a progress bar. PowerCast speeds are impressive - I installed a 2Gb Windows 98 SE partition to one test client over switched Fast Ethernet in under five minutes, while PowerCasting to two clients simultaneously only took a few seconds longer. The Pro version also offers a DeltaDeploy tool for distributing software installation routines over a network and comes bundled with the well-respected PartitionMagic 5.

Overall, PowerQuest's disk-imaging software offers some useful features and is easy to use, although some technical competence will be required when creating the various boot disks. Apart from the fact that older CD-R and CD-RW drives may not be supported, Drive Image will undoubtedly prove a useful tool for hard-disk upgrades, while the Pro version delivers sophisticated multicasting features.