2 Replies Latest reply: Jul 14, 2010 7:14 AM by John T Smith RSS

    Need a simple, free program to make bootable disk image.

    J.Elliott8652 Community Member

      Folks,

       

      I'm looking all around for a freeware backup to create simple, bootable disk images for both Win7/64 and XP/32 builds. Nothing fancy, just as a disaster backup for the seven computers I'm zeroing out and re-loading for my math class.  My builds are straightforward single-partition, single-disk machines.

       

      I need to keep these machines clean and the school's network uninfected, so if I suspect an ugly virus or porn has sneeked in on a thumb drive my hope is to zero out the drive and simply re-load. I haven't yet had the pleasure of trying to re-load from a disk image.

       

      I've got 40 hours into this project and am ready to backup all of them. I'll probably do something rash if another glitch causes me to re-load for the nth time this week.  Freakin' 10 hours a day at it!  (Please - don't even ask about the deadline today in getting my XP Service Pack 2 machines updated before Microsoft ends support for SP2....)

       

      Luckily, Win 7 has a disk image applet I've used to create a disk image on an external drive and a recovery disk for these builds.  I hope this built-in feature is good enough.

       

      My three XP builds have no such luxury, so I'm looking for a freeware app to create bootable recovery disks on DVD. The full XP load is only about 10GB, so this is merely three DVD's.

       

      I've gone all 'round the net, checking out reviews.  Anybody here have a favorite?  I do see a vote for Terabyte in Harm's "Favorite Tools" thread.