DISCUSSION - ("Cold") disk imaging

To image my drives/partitions I boot Parted magic and use ghost4linux (raw sector mode).

 

Drive snapshot here, never lets me down.

 

Maybe check this thread: https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/discussion-cold-disk-imaging.52728/

 

I use HD-Clone 6.x/X.2 and Macrium Reflect 7&8.both are fast and reliable. Both are free (Home Version) and as paid available.

 

MR imaged my 500 GB SSD in 7 mins. That was awesome.

 

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IMO Terabyte's products are the best, in all their dimensions.
Image for Windows
Image for Linux

Personally I'm expecting they add a new feature like Macrium Reflect has: the ability to make automatic restores with automatic reboot. All done from it's GUI. This the only feature IFW currently lacks.

 

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Now Try RStudio Network Technician Edition & See the Difference =======>

 

I've used RStudio for Data recovery. Never saw anything about imaging...

 

Yes You are Correct but my response is to palladin.
Walleh Mashalleh Subhanalleh

 

Any disk imaging software that can clone a 512bytes sector drive to a 4k sector drive? Maybe even the same physical drive after conversion.

Ghost can't work with 4k sectors.

Edit: by "drive" I mean windows installation, 10 or 11.

 

Use dism /capture, reformat the HDD, use dism /apply, fix the boot using bcdboot.

Disk imaging in 2023 make sense for forensic scopes or to clone sector by sector unsupported filesystems, other than that is just pointless to spend money on them when all you need is inside windows since the release of Win7

 

Can I do that from external OS (WinPE)? I have stripped Volume Shadow Copy and similar things.

And, do I need to use sysprep? I'd like to avoid it.

Thanks.

 

Yes you should do that offline, it's the best thing to do anyway, but in case of change of sector it's obviously the only way, you cant format an HDD where the OS is residing.

Not a vss guru here, I really don't understand what you mean as stripped shadow copy, do you mean you are actually using the vss service to have multiple copies of selected files?

Sysprep has nothing to do with dism, you use it if you want to have a virgin installation, to deploy it on multiple [virtual] machines.

For archiving proposal it's useless, to say better it's detrimental.

 

I meant, I had removed VSS with NTLite. But I see it's not needed anyway.

So no problem for this operation, and for backup purposes I'll use Macrium Reflect. I think it's easier for me (at least until I learn command line parameters of DISM, if any).

Just another stupid question (sorry): Does Dism by any chance remove/modify any registry entries (for example, parts of Current User, or remove entire CU and force you to create another user)? Like Windows Updates do with restoring some registry entries.

 

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hello
DISMGUI gimagex

 

Hi,
The same as the Title! A fast, effective, light weight 3rd party app that can image & save single System Partition (C: ) to an size efficient image in ISO or IMG format.
( Not interested in DISM methods! )
Thanks for all the help!

 

Light weight 3rd party: Drive Snapshot
Installable and portable versions.
Best one in my opinion.
Only SNA format files are created with it.