Drive Image 4, Drive Image Pro 4

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 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.