PowerQuest Drive Image 2002 review

If you're in the market for personal disk-imaging software, there are only two products worth looking at - Symantec's Norton Ghost and PowerQuest's Drive Image. However, when Ghost 2002 was released last year, it offered few improvements, with support for Windows XP the only significant addition. Not so with the new Drive Image 2002. PowerQuest has completely revamped the product with a wealth of extra features and a new, and extremely welcome, Windows interface.

Drive Image 2002 is packed with Wizards, making it even easier to use. In fact, the first thing it does after installation is offer to create a dedicated backup partition on a local drive and take an image of selected partitions. It can use any storage device to which DOS can assign a drive letter and comes with drivers for Iomega devices and Fujitsu MO (magneto optical) drives. CD-R/RW devices can also be used, but only MMC2-complaint drives are supported.

One feature of Ghost 2002 that you won't find here is support for peer-to-peer connections, allowing imaging tasks to be run between two PCs over a parallel or USB port link. PowerQuest has only now caught up with Ghost 2002's tool, which allows you to copy and restore images over a network. A Disk Builder utility lets you create a boot floppy, which loads the DOS NDIS2 driver for your selected network adaptor, logs onto a workgroup or domain and maps a network drive using the supplied UNC path. This works well enough, providing you have a popular network card, but we've encountered problems with older cards and a number of laptop PC Card adaptors. If you want network support available whenever Drive Image 2002 reboots your system, you can create a virtual floppy disk, which is a file maintained locally on the hard disk and used to boot the system to DOS. An option in the Disk Builder allows you to create a new virtual boot file, which loads the network adaptor drivers prior to running Drive Image 2002.

The biggest problem with imaging software is that it requires exclusive access to the hard disks, so it can only be run once the system has been booted to DOS. The QuickImage feature introduced in Drive Image 5 (see Reviews, issue 87, p206) provides a good workaround, as it allows you to generate image-creation jobs from within Windows and schedule them to run at a convenient time. Symantec doesn't offer any automation, so you have to reboot your PC and run Ghost 2002 manually from the DOS prompt, while Windows NT, 2000 or XP users must reboot their PC using a DOS boot disk.

Drive Image 2002 builds on the features offered by QuickImage and even allows some imaging tasks on non-system partitions to be run without leaving Windows. Imaging boot partitions still requires exiting to a DOS environment, but once you've selected this option from the Windows interface Drive Image 2002 will reboot the system, run the task and return to Windows on completion. This automation comes in handy for backup operations, as you can schedule imaging tasks to run during unattended hours.

Performance tests were carried out on a Celeron/900 system equipped with a pair of 15Gb ATA/100 hard disks and running Windows XP Professional. Ghost 2002 proved to be marginally faster - even though we had to run it manually, we created a backup image of a 4Gb NTFS partition onto the second drive in under eight minutes, whereas PowerQuest's automated routine took a shade over ten minutes.

There's much more to Drive Image's new Windows interface, as it now provides quick access to copy and restore functions. To image a drive or partition, just select the source and destination and either run it immediately or place it in the Windows Task Scheduler. A new Disk Operations window provides basic hard disk management tools, allowing you to create and delete partitions, hide them or make them active. If you have some empty space, Drive Image 2002 can even automatically distribute it evenly among existing partitions.