Hello DriveImage XML. For anyone who’s ever need to make an image of their hard drives for various reasons, you’ve probably come across products like Norton/Symantec Ghost, which I’ve used for a while until I recently found the DriveImage product, which happens to be better in a lot of ways and it’s free.
In addition to being able to do live copies of the running OS (using the Volume Shadow Service) and being able to browse and extract individual files from the images at a later date, there is a plugin which allows you to run it in WinPE.
I don’t remember if I’ve blogged about this before (and I don’t want to check right now), but I’ve found all sorts of interesting uses for the WinPE utility, which allows you to run Windows XP from a boot CD, which you need to do for things like easily working with NTFS drives, etc. WinPE is normally only available to OEMs, but normal everyday users can make use of it courtesy of PEBuilder.