[unicorn]

Thank you hamslammer.

Part 4 - some tips

For you interested in trying different imagemakers (imagemaker; here an application capable of making an image of a partition or a harddrive)...

You might run into situations where Ghost or Partition Magic or any other similar software claims that there is something wrong with your harddrive. It might be something like "Error with partition table - do you want this to be fixed?" If this happens - don't "fix" it. For reasons I am not sure of different applications react in different ways to more complicated partition tables. Maybe everything isn't that standardized as one could wish. Just leave it as everything probably is just fine.

Make use of the very good feature of BootIt NG and make a backup of your partition table(s).

The images different imagemakers produce aren't interchangeable. No surprise but anyway; Images made by Ghost can be handled by Ghost only (or Ghostexplorer by all means), images made by BootIt NG can be handled by BootIt NG only (or the native util TBIview). Never store your images at the same physical harddrive. You can save them to any partition that can be read but... If the drive brokes it doesn't help having the backup another partition...

The images should be stored at a safe place. Peferable outside the box. They can be stored at a harddrive in another machine (networking) or, preferable, be burned to either CDs (sometimes many) or DVDs (recommended). An other solution is to place them at another harddrive within the same box. Conveniant, cheap and fast - as long as not a viiri attacks the files (my method together with burning DVDs, I have never had any imagefile destroyed by a viiri - yet).

I still haven't had any use of my long complicated serial for BootIt NG. This is obviously due to the fact that I never tried to install it. I just use my floppies to boot into NG, say "Cancel" to installation and then use the imaging capabilities. This means that anyone interested can download and use NG for free as an option to pay money for Ghost, True Image, driveImage or whatever. You have to buy a license though for installing it and make use of the other features like multibooting or making a lot of primary partitions and so on.

Next: Conclusions.