Disk Imaging Tools

• Disk imaging software creates a complete copy of a hard drive. Creative Crop/Digital Vision/Getty Images

  Disk imaging utilities are software programs designed to make complete copies of entire hard drives, including all partitions and boot records. With disk imaging software, a hard drive can be copied directly to another hard drive or to an image file. The image file is transportable and contains a complete copy of all of the imaged drive's contents.

CloneZilla

• CloneZilla is a free program that works with many different types of hard drives and partition types. One of the advantages of CloneZilla is that is is configurable with network support to transfer hard drive images over a network connection. CloneZilla is distributed as a file that you download and burn to a CD. After the CD is burned, you run the program by booting your computer from the newly burned disc.

Norton Ghost

• Norton Ghost is one of the most popular disk imaging tools. Ghost is most popular with Microsoft Windows systems due to its support for FAT and NTFS file systems, which are used by Windows to keep track of all of the files on the hard drive. The corporate version of Ghost also supports networking.

PartImage

• PartImage is free software based on GNU/Linux and includes the ability to copy an entire hard drive to an image file. When creating an image file, PartImage includes the option to compress the image file so that it takes up less space than an entire hard drive.

R-Drive Image

• R-Drive Image includes support for copying an entire hard drive to another drive, even if the drives are not the same size. R-Drive Image also supports creating compressible image files out of hard drives. Unlike other drive imaging software, R-Drive Image creates bit-for-bit copies of entire hard drives, which means the hard drive may contain any filesystem or data configuration.