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Hi,
I use DI all the time and have the following answers to your questions:
Q: Once you have created your image, can you restore to a formatted hard drive
A. Yes, however, the restore operation will destroy whatever format exisits in the partition that you are restoring to and will change it to whatever is in the image. For example, if the image was of a FAT32 partition and you restore it to a NTFS partition, the NTFS partition will no longer exist and will be changed to a FAT32 partition (and vice versa). Even within the same format things will change if the image size is different from the hard drive partition you are restoring to and you tell the program to resize the image to fit the new partition (this is useful when upgrading to a new larger hard drive).
and can you restore it within windows - though I would have thought it would be better to format the drive first.
A. No, all image creation and restore operations occur in a DOS environment. The reason for this is that Windows locks a number of files making it impossible to copy or restore them while Windows is running. Can you imagine the mess and corruption that would result if you overwrote the Windows swap file with old information while Windows was running?
Q: Do both utilities format the drive for you before restoring the image using a DOS bootdisk, or does the image just overwrite what's on the drive?
A. As noted above, the file system and format is stored/saved in the image file. The restore operation simply restores that system to the selected partition on the hard drive.
I hope this helps,
Tomboy
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