BuildOrBuy Group Network
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Restore CD Image Options

Our research... Our options and our evaluations. In the coming months, we'll be looking into the how each of these applications accomplishes this task.

1.) Retrospect Backup by Dantz - Disaster Recovery Emergency Restore CD! Loved it! Worked great! We've graduated though to larger HDs. Why would anyone back up anything these days when Cloning a HD is so much faster? And Hard Drives are getting larger and less expensive per megabyte!

2.) PowerQuest Drive Image - www.powerquest.com Supports hard drives up to 80 GB, as well as support for FAT, FAT32, NTFS, HPFS and Linux ext2/Swap file systems. Gone! Happens to anything Symantec touches!

3.) Norton Ghost - www.symantec.com/ghost/ Writes disk images directly to many popular CD-R/CD-RW drives.

4.) Phoenix Technologies - RestoreBuilder: www.phoenix.com Build a bootable restoration CD-ROM; WinXP Problems...? BIOS Lock & Vendor Lock - Drive Imaging with ImageCast by StorageSoft. NONE of the direct links into phoenix last for long. They change them constantly therefore Users will have to search their site accordingly.

A form of the Phoenix Drive Imaging technology can be found in the current Gigabyte Motherboards we're using for our BuildOrBuy Build Sessions. When installed from the Motherboard Driver CD, this allows a HD to create & maintain a hidden partition with an image of the primary partition. This has been available since 2004. Does it work? Sure. Note: Does NOT work with SATA AHCI configured HDs.

5.) www.avanquest.com - DiskCopy and Clean - Safely Copy Everything to Your New Drive Formerly: VCOM - Product - DriveWorks: Provides Partitioning, Imaging, Drive Copying, and security erase. [Never used it. Don't know anything about it.]

Drive Imaging Resources:

1. Migration - Microsoft.com: Windows 2000 - Desktop Deployment Solutions from Third-Party Companies
2. BackUp -
3. Drive Imaging -
4. Cloning -
5. Vector Design Image Backup your Boot Drive
6. PC Mechanic - Hardware Reviews - CNET.com - Hard-Drive Copycats
7. Win2000 - Boot Floppy ERD (Emergency Repair Disk)

Our Expectations & Requirements in 2001:

1.) A Bootable CD Restore Image (ISO Bootable CD - El Torito Bootable CD-ROM).
2.) Ease Of Use - K.I.S.S.! Preferably No DOS!
3.) Once Created, can this be used on ANY similarly configured PC?
4.) NTFS - Can they handle that?
5.) Reliance upon another application - i.e. CD-RW application.
6.) Does it work as promised when needed? ... All the time, every time!?!
7.) How much time does this require to perform this task?
8.) Cost - Can we afford not too?

Our Expectations & Requirements in 2008:

From 1.4 MB Floppies to 250 MB Tape.... To 640 MB CD's & DVD's to Total Drive Imaging & Drive Cloning. How much can we archive and How fast can we Archive? And what are we archiving? A Boot Disk, Data, our life's work or what? Priorities!