Drive Image 4 Writes to CD

PowerQuest's Drive Image is one great backup tool. Within a few minutes, you can have a near-perfect copy of a hard drive or partition--complete with boot sector, Windows, and hidden files--in one compressed (but still huge) image file. But Drive Image has always had a major problem: Where, aside from your hard drive, could you put that big file?

The new $70 Drive Image 4.0 takes a major step toward fixing that problem by adding CD-Recordable and CD-Rewritable support. The new version also overcomes some problems with Windows Me, NT, and 2000. Unfortunately, the new features are poorly documented, and the user interface isn't entirely thought-out.

Floppy-Free Launching

Drive Image is a DOS program--there's simply no way for it to do its job from inside Windows. It's always been easy to launch the application from an icon within Windows 9x, causing Windows to exit and the DOS program to start up. But Windows NT, 2000, and Me can't exit to DOS, so previous versions of Drive Image required you to reboot from a floppy to load the program.

Version 4.0 solves that problem. Now the icon reboots your computer to a DOS-based virtual floppy disk, where Drive Image loads. It's a good solution, but not a flawless one. For instance, if you're using Windows 98, Drive Image takes dramatically longer to load than the previous version did--by nearly a factor of four on my test system.

This virtual floppy is also responsible for one small annoyance. Every program saves data to a default location (such as My Documents). Drive Image 4.0's default location is that small, temporary virtual floppy--but that disk isn't big enough to hold an image file, so you must direct the file elsewhere. Since you can't change the default, you have to tell the program to save to a different location every time you create or open a file.