After spending yonks reinstalling windows etc after a major virus infection screwed it all up
I want to backup the drive to make it easier in future.
Bit like the disk that came with my own laptop that resets it to "as new" state.

So Norton Ghost or is there something better and free ?

I've used Acronis True Image, which is quite user friendly and has some good compression options.

This one's free and open source, no personal experience though.

http://odin-win.sourceforge.net/

norton Ghost ( the only noton programe that is any good )
not free though

used various ver for years

Regards

Agriv8

We use acronis true image at work, not the regular version, but the BartPe plugin on a Ultimate boot cd.

bootable windows xp cd with a huge load of freeware tools on

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

partedmagic truly free software
http://partedmagic.com

You can download and run gparted from the cd and it can resize, delete or copy partitions from your drive. Oops! Link here

[Edited on 31/10/08 by Peteff]

i used Norton to completely copy the rebuilt drive with all programs/info to a USB drive that i could swap over, for doing that got to say it was hard work, very poor instructions etc. so depends if you are creating an image/disk that you can work from for XP+ a few programs or all your info as well. if just xp+ programs then theres free shareware that will allow u to slipstream xp+ various drivers to make a new instal disc, RAID to permanently run a second drive as a realtime backup ( cost of drive+ few quicd for hardware if needed), or Acronis from what i've read for 'fuller' copy/backup.

I guess they are all similar - I have used HDClone to copy on old HDD to a new, larger, HDD and it all worked fine and produced a bootable disc. There's a free version which is slow but you can leave it running, say overnight.

HDClone