>>No idea. You've got more patience or Merlot than me. I would have formatted
>>that sucker hours ago.
>
>Imagine that you work at a software company, in a position that demands that you install fresh bits on, at the very least, a semi-weekly basis. Imagine that sometimes a bad build will render your machine to the status of "boat anchor" once in a while. I don't know how any serious developer or tester gets by without disk imaging software. Make a copy of the bits on a stable drive, and then when you trash it, just take that copy of bits and put them back on the drive. In essence, it's just like it was last time it was stable.
>
>Why image instead of format and reinstall? Because once I've got a a stable system, with Windows 2000, Office, and a copy of VS6, I image it and if I trash the system, I can be back to work in 5-10 minutes. Compare this to formatting the drive, reinstalling the OS, reinstalling VS, and reinstalling any office apps you might use. You can easily blow half a day trying to get it running again. I don't pay for the stuff, but I'll bet imaging software has to be less than US$100, much less than a half day's work.
>

You bet - PQ's DriveCopy, Norton (? - I think they're the most recent buyers) GHOST, Adaptec's Image Backup (part of EZ-SCSI) and a number of similar utilities all are available for under $100.

Another thing that I use images for is to keep test environments on-hand for my standard install testing. I have about a dozen 'standard' Windows system installs which include OS and apps at various versions, which I keep on hand, pre-configured for one of my work systems here at home. If I need to test one of these environments, I blow out an image of one of my development boxes to my LAN, blow out the partition table for the main drive and install one of the pre-configured images either from my LAN or from a CD. I use Adaptec's software since I have it already and my standard test system has a SCSI controller in it; I've got a number of clients using DriveCopy or GHOST for setting up their testing environments.

>I recommend imaging just the OS and apps, and not data. You can easily backup data through various painless means. What software do I recommend? I don't, I just use what they give us at work. We're currently using PQDI (sorry, I have no clue where it comes from). Is it better or worse than anything else? I don't know, but I do know that it serves my needs very well.
>

That's the Pro version of PowerQuest's DriveCopy, which is an unlimited organizational license of DriveCopy with some nifty add-ons for handling things like generating new SIDs for NT/2K images. If you're dealing with environments where the extra services are useful, I think it retails for $495 for the enterprise level Pro license. DriveCopy, which is licensed for a single machine, was in the $50-75 range the last time I looked.