PowerQuest Drive Image 2002

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Greetings to all!,

I have a Dell Dimension 4100, Pentium III 933 mhz, 256 mb of ram, Windows ME, 60gb hard drive (C: of which 20gb was used up). My C: drive was giving me problems so Dell sent me a replacement drive (a refurbished 80gb-thanks, Dell). My plan was to copy the old drive to the refurbished before it died.

I didn’t know whether to purchase Ghost or PowerQuest’s Drive Image so (based on Woody’s like for the product) I purchased Drive Image 2002. I ran it with the ‘Copy Drive’ selection from my old 60gb to the replacement 80gb. Once completed I noticed my 80 gb replacement drive only had 60 gb allocated and my original 60 gb C: drive went from 20gb used to 5 gb used! So I ran fdisk and reformatted the replacement drive again in hopes of doing another CopyDrive with a switch to keep the outpu drive as the size it was originally. I ran a DriveCopy again and got all 80 gb allocated but only 5gb used up instead of the 20 gb. Everything seems to be there. It’s like Drive Image compressed my input drive. I noticed many file properties are now marked as ARCHIVED. The Drive Image manual is next to useless as well as the PowerQuest web site. Live support is $30 U.S. dollars during the day/$95 night (the software cost $70). The e-mail support didn’t answer my question as to whether my input drive was compressed or not and how can I uncompress it.

So, Drive Image users, would you please share any information you can? If Drive Image compressed my input drive:
– is there a way to tell?
– can I uncompress it?
– if so, can I do that?

I checked msinfo32 and it doesn’t see my drive as compressed. The system works slower than it did before. I really don’t want to reformat and re-install everything unless I have to. I’m stuck.

Thank you all in advance!

LMD

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It was never satisfactory for me either. I’d be very interested in something more user friendly.

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Oh boy, Eileen, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been disappointed. I used Ghost once, quite some time ago, and I didn’t like it at all, so I stayed with Drive Image. I use it every weekend to back up eight hard drives on four different machines (sometimes nine & five, if my son wants his laptop done too!) I hardly ever (never?) use the drive copier function. I use it to make backup IMAGES to an old Pentium Pro 200 machine I didn’t have the heart to throw away.

As much as I couldn’t do without Drive Image or Partition Magic, PowerQuest leaves a lot to be desired in the support area. They’re hard to get in touch with, when you do they take far too long to respond, AND I think their “truthfullness” in describing product updates is really weak. I for one STILL don’t think that Drive Image is a true-Windows product. When you run it from inside Windows, on the C: drive, the dadburned thing drops out to some hybrid DOS. That’s why I STILL run from floppy disk.

In spite of all those feelings, the two products are VERY VALUABLE to me and I think worth the pretty-modest price. Well, such is life, or kay-sara or whatever…..

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I’ve used Drive Image ever since their very first version and you’re right – their support isn’t so hot one way or the other. As far as I know, DI wouldn’t compress anything without you checking it off and even then I think that’s only when you make a drive image, not a copy. I’ll have to go check, but I don’t think the copier function has ANY compression capability. Now, what other possibilities are there? Well, for starters you should think about the Windows swap file and/or the recycle bin. Since I admit to not having used the copy feature for a LONG time, I don’t know if it would copy those two elements from one drive to another. That could account for some or all of the shrinkage. One important thing you said is that everything seems to be there! What did you do with the “old” drive? Is it also in the machine as a second (or third) drive? I think when you COPY from one drive to another, the “archive” marking is the default, but once again I’d have to go looking.

I wanted to get here fast, ’cause it looks to me from what you told us, that you’re OK. I hope that old drive is still working but I don’t think you’re going to need it. Don’t know if we’ll ever solve the mystery of the disappearing 15 gig – I just thought of something else too: maybe there were a lot of .tmp files or something like that on there. Don’t know…..

Hang in there and come back here and let us know how it’s doing…..

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See Pages 21 and 22 of the DI Quick Start Guide.
Creating images
1…
5 Choose a compression level for the image.
6…
7 Click Finish

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Yeah Dave – IMAGES, not copies though. But you were so danged fast, I haven’t had time to go checking yet.

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I just checked the user doc (PDF) file and there’s no mention of compression. So, I ran the program too. No compression mentioned anywhere for copying a drive. I did see where the default is NOT to use all the space on the destination. Darn shame – that shouldn’t be the default. Well, at least he managed around that one. How ’bout it, LMD?

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Al and Eileen,

Thank you for your replies!

Al, I had to return the old hard drive to Dell. If I didn’t return it in 15 days I would have been billed $152 U.S. dollars for the replacement refurbished 80gb Maxtor they sent, otherwise it was free. I bought a new 80gb Seagate Barracuda from Dell for $92 for a ‘backup’ drive. I have MS Office 2000 Premium fully loaded, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Juno, Netzero, NAV, one of those ‘CARD’ programs with all the images on disk, etc. So, this is why the drop is size gave me great concern as I tended to install everything so as not to use the cd.

I intend to do my first backup IMAGE with the NO COMPRESSION switch this weekend. If the size changes to something normal then I’ll know that it was somehow compressed and I’ll do a restore.

Thanks again, I appreciate all of you caring loungers who help!

LMD

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OK, so you DO have both 80 gig’ers in the machine, huh? Be careful though. Even when you make IMAGES rather than a COPY, Drive Image (I think) doesn’t copy the swap file and maybe other stuff as well. So, your image file size will always be somewhat different than what “properties” you would get with Explorer in checking the drive. By the way, I suggest you ALWAYS run a CHKDSK /Fon the source drive BEFORE you run Drive Image. One of its shortcomings is that it will occasionally hiccup if IT finds any bad files or sectors. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always barf until it gets all the way to the end and you get an error. Wait a minute, you SAID you’re running Win ME. You should use SCANDISK, not CHKDSK! Sorry…..

I’m a little confused by your statement: “….and I’ll do a restore.” Is what you did originally stored in an image? I understood you to say you had COPIED the going-bad drive. Well, stay in touch. We’ll do what we can to “hep” y’all (the Kentuckian in me speakin’)

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Al,

Yes, all I have done is a Copy Drive. If all checked well (other than size) I wanted to create my first image unto the new drive with the no compression so I can compare the sizes. I’ll keep in mind the swap file info.

Thanks!

LMD

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