Price:
A Google review of  the availability of the program shows that the lowest available price was $15 plus shipping.  The average price was about $29. 

System Requirements:
Pentium compatible processor or higher, 32 Mb of RAM, 35 Mb of hard drive space, a CD, and a floppy.

PowerQuest Inc.,
P.O. Box 1911,
Orem Utah,
84059-1911

www.powerquest.com

Support:

A self-help knowledge base at www.powerquest.com/ support.

E-mail technical support at www.powerquest.com/ support/emsupport.cfm.

Fee based support at 800-757-5049.  A credit card is charged $30 for each incident.

DRIVE IMAGE 2002 by Power Quest

By Sheldon Hoffman  

DRIVE IMAGE by Power Quest is an application for creating backup files of programs and data on a Windows computer. It creates backup files of the all hard drives, any hard drive, or any partition of a hard drive. The backup files can be located on any local hard drive, on a networked hard drive, or written to a CD-R disk for archive storage.  

The box I received contained 2 CDs; Drive Image 7 for Windows XP and 2000Pro, and Drive Image 2002 for Windows ME, 98, 95 and NT. Since I am running Win98SE on a Pentium4/450MHz, this report only pertains to Drive Image 2002.  My system has 262 MB of ram and a 20Gb hard drive; this satisfies the requirements stated in the manual. Included in the box was a 30 page Quick Start Guide. On each CD there is also an expanded Manual in PDF format that has more details on installation and use.  

The installation was easy, fast, and flawless. Optional drivers are provided for systems having Iomega, SCSI, and/or Fujitsu hardware. A setup Wizard is included to create a partition on an existing drive for storing the backup files. This Wizard appears to be a version of Partition Magic, another product of Power Quest. I normally use a second drive for backups. If the primary drive fails, I just swap the backup drive and I am up and running with little delay. I did not use the Wizard.  

I started the evaluation by backing-up drive C: to available space on drive D:. The procedure was fast and flawless. The program asked what to backup and where to backup. Since this was the first time, the program asked about optional settings; check for system errors, verify disk writes, hide source and destination files after copying, and more.  The options are retained and used for subsequent copies unless changed. The backup speed was 110M bytes per minute.  The 3 Gbyte C: drive was converted to a 472 Mbyte file (high compression) in 7.5 minutes.  This is significantly faster than my ancient attempts to tape backup, and even faster than Windows Backup.  

I then did a second backup to a CD-R. Again a flawless event, but it took about 15 seconds longer.  

When creating an image of a drive with an operating system, Drive Image reverts to a DOS boot mode.  This is to make certain that no Windows files are in use, which would prevent them from being imaged.  

I unsuccessfully attempted to make a backup image onto another computer on my three-system LAN.  This process required creating a Network Boot Disc (2 floppies) that has the ability to see the network drive in DOS boot mode.  In creating these disks, there is some misunderstanding on how to identify the network card.  This will be worked on in the near future.  

To show that the saved images could be restored, I first selected a single file from the image CD and restored it to drive A: with no problems.  

I then took a spare hard drive and did an fdisk and format to make sure the drive was ‘fresh’.  I installed this fresh drive as drive D:, and using Drive Image, I restored the backup from the CD-R to the fresh drive.  I installed this not-so-fresh drive into a different computer and after making the usual bios adjustments was able to start the computer and show that Windows was indeed installed and able to run.  The new system was clone of the original because the registry data was intact.  

I conclude from these experiments that the Drive Image program performs as described by the designers.  It is surprisingly fast, and has a comfortable user interface.  It makes archiving a simple task, and is useful for transferring whole drives when upgrading a system with new larger drives.  It does not allow backing up anything smaller than a partition; this would be the domain of other programs. However, restoring directories or files is possible.