When Symantecs Norton Ghost 2002 was released last year, it offered few improvements, with support for Windows XP the only significant addition. Not so with Drive Image 2002. PowerQuest has completely revamped the product with a wealth of extra features and an 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 Magneto Optical drives.
CD-R/RW devices can also be used, but only MMC2-complaint drives are supported.Drive Image 2002 can now copy and restore images over a network, but lacks Ghost 2002s peer-to-peer connections, allowing imaging tasks to be run between two PCs over a parallel or USB port link. A Disk Builder utility with Drive Image 2002 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 if you have a popular network card, but weve encountered problems with older cards and a number of 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 in general 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 (February 2002, page 86) 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 doesnt 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 many imaging tasks on non-system partitions to be run without leaving Windows. Imaging boot partitions still requires exiting to a DOS environment, but once selected from the Windows interface Drive Image 2002 will reboot the system, run the task and return to Windows on completion. This automation is handy for backups, as you can schedule imaging tasks to run during unattended hours.
Performance tests were carried out on a 900MHz Celeron 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 PowerQuests automated routine took a shade over ten minutes.
Drive Images new Windows interface now provides quick access to copy and restore functions. To image a drive or partition, 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. The ImageExplorer utility, introduced in the previous version, allows you to view the contents of image files, copy files or folders back to their original locations or a new destination and copy other partitions to new or existing image files, giving the images the flexibility of a simple compressed file. PowerQuests DataKeeper utility is no longer included a pity, as its a useful real-time backup tool.
Its been a long time coming, but the new Windows interface is a huge improvement to an already sophisticated disk-imaging tool. Norton Ghost 2002 has a slight edge on performance and offers support for peer-to-peer connections, but it cant match Drive Image 2002 for automation, ease of use and overall feature.