I bought a Sony Vaio notebook, running Windows 2000, and a Sony iLink CD-RW. The CD-RW came bundled with PowerQuest Drive Image 4.0 and a number of other utilities. I had intended to get an imaging utility that could capture the whole of my hard drive, especially the virgin installation.
I contacted PowerQuest and then Norton, but was told that although CD-RW drives could be used for backup and are compatible with Windows 2000 they are not compatible with PC Card, USB or FireWire devices, the latter being the one that my drive uses. How can I get the backup I would like to achieve?
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The problem with disk-imaging utilities is that, in order to access the hard disk sector-by-sector, they work from DOS. This means that they can only be used with IDE or SCSI drives, for which DOS drivers are available. There are no DOS drivers for drives that are connected using PC Card, USB or FireWire interfaces and it isn't very likely that there will be any.
If your hard disk is big enough to make it feasible, you could consider using PartitionMagic (www.powerquest.com) to shrink your C drive partition and create a separate hidden backup partition. You could then create an image backup on that, instead.
Otherwise, your only option is to use a conventional backup program that runs from Windows. This would mean that you will have to reinstall Windows and your CD drivers in the event that you need to perform a full restore.
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Introduction | General