If I image my hard drive to an external one and the internal one dies, is it possible to copy the external image to a new internal drive without an active OS, or does the process rely on a bootable PC? I haven't got round to the software yet, so if there's free, that would be be good. Thanks.
Yes, you can copy the image back to the same HD or to a new HD formated in same system (NTFS or Fat32) as the original HD. New HD must be as large or larger than the original.
Drive Imaging software rely upon a "bootable CD" to drive the recovery process.
Otherwise, there would practically be no purpose for taking a drive image as backup, if it relied upon a bootable OS.
Drive Image backups are useful for a lot of purposes, but most importantly for "catastrophic failure"… for instance if you fried your HD. Therefore, the answer to your question "has to be yes" or there is really no purpose.
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Norton and Acronis are the leaders and most preferred.
One problem/consideration with "any" drive image software is the "validity" of the copied drive image and it's ability to be competently installed as a working replacement.
I highly recommend that you keep a "spare" blank HD.
You would use the spare HD as a "test bed" for your drive image .iso to see that it is in fact capable of being installed as a working replacement.
Most complaints about "free" drive image software have to do with failure at time of installing the image to recover your system….. Obviously at the most critical moment when you cannot afford a failure.
Best Regards
I've used the free DriveImage XML several times to restore a Windows XP Pro boot partition after I had some problems and it worked well. I used UBCD4WIN to create a bootable Windows XP CD that includes DriveImage XML so any time I needed it, I booted that CD and used DIXML to restore from my backup.
Having said that though, I now use only Acronis True Image. I just upgraded to TI 2009, though TI2010 is out or will soon be out. It is incredibly easy to use, utterly reliable and works. You can setup all kinds of automated backups as well as do manual backups, browse backups to extract single files or entire folders. To be fair you can do the browsing with DIXML as well, but no built in automation.
