Vista - Drive Image Pro

I have a legal, licensed copy of Drive Image Pro and want to make an image of my entire hard drive on my laptop.

I have WinXP Home, WinXP Pro, Vista Ultimate x32 and Win7 Beta x32 on the system.

If I install Drive Image Pro from WinXP and launch from XP, shouldn't I be able to effectively make an image of all partitions that should the need ever present itself, I could restore the entire drive ?

I realize that Vista and Win7 aren't compatible, but since I'm launching from within XP, shouldn't I be safe?

Any thoughts/feedback is appreciated!

Hello JWhipple,

It should not be any problem imaging you hard drive. However, better is to make the
image of the whole drive and/or any partition using bootable disc. Especially if you have four OS on the disk. If you have media with your Drive Image Pro, probably
you can boot your system using this disc.

Do not trust any backup applications that claims that you can make image of the drive
while the operating system is running at the same time. You should do image from
the bootable media, only.

Personally I prefer the Spotmau Power Suite on bootable CD. With it I can backup and
partition the hard drive, optimize and recover Windows. You can check this out...

Spotmau PowerSuite 2009 - Never been so easy to fix your computer

That's my 2 cents...Cheers...

Do you think there will be any issues because of the size of the hard drive? This application is from back in 2002 when drives weren't nearly as large as they are today :-)

I think, there won't be any problems. You should reserve at least 70GB to 80GB ( depending on the compression ratio of you program) on your 500GB external drive if you will be imaging the 160GB one.