Steven Burn said:
Anyone aware of any freeware along the lines of Symantec's Norton Ghost
(I know, I'm ashamed to mention them aswell) that will allow me to
backup a partition to ISO (so I can store it on a seperate HD)?.
The ISO format is not used for this purpose.
These partition image programs use their own formats.
If you use ghost it will use the .gho extension.
In the freeware program "Partition Saving" you can use any filename you
want, but .par is recommended.
If you really want an ISO image you need to first create a partition
image, and then create an ISO, in some burner program, which will have
the partition image as content, a single file.
The compression in all these programs can be set to 50%, lite
compression. 1.4GB can be stored in a 700 MB image file.
All these programs allow you to save only the content on your hard disk,
not the empty space. I saw somebody write that Drive Image does not allow
it but that is wrong. I have used it earlier and I always saved only the
content.
The main difference between these programs is that the freeware program,
Partition Saving, has no explorer functions at all.
Drive Image has explorer function which allows you to see inside the
file, and copy out from it.
Ghost explorer functions are the best. Image files can be opened like zip
files, view the content, copy out from it or into it, so you can change
the image file.
I recently used that to get rid of a file which could not be deleted.
I created a ghost image of my C: partition, removed the file in the
image, and restored the partition from the image.
