Disk Imaging and Recovery software

[stilz]

Hello guys,
I just recently had to reinstall Windows due to some weird problems I do not know how to fix; it's a pain. Now that I have a fresh installation, I'm looking for software that makes disk images that can be burned onto DVDs and recovered without booting Windows.
Thanks for your help.

[Phoenix]

acronis true image

[Hard core Rikki]

Quoting by preference and featureset:

1 - Acronis True Image (moneeey!)
2 - Trinity Rescue Kit (a liveCD, literraly, nice. freeee! Download it from HERE)
3 - Norton Ghost (moneeey!)

Trinity Rescue Kit is a 100% free CD bootable Linux distribution (live cd) aimed specifically at offline operations for Windows and Linux systems such as rescue, repair, password resets and disk cloning, with the ability to update itself . It has custom tools to easily recover data such as deleted files, clone Windows installations over the network, perform antivirus sweeps with 2 different antivirus products, reset windows passwords, read AND write on NTFS partitions, edit partition layout and much much more.

[Iran]

format is slow and irritating especially if you got so many things installed on your pc, if your system starts to act strange try a simple system file checker run first, it might save you the hassle of reformating your pc.

sfc /scannow

[stilz]

I actually had to reinstall two PCs.
One of them had ECS nforce3-a mobo; for some reason sound and onboard NIC stopped working. Neither of them is a hardware problem. By "stopped working" I mean: NIC doesn't show up in Windows device manager, and for sound, it shows up but when I run dxdiag (or anything that involves sound output) it gives me a error even though input is fine.
The other one had the problem of not able to install latest DirectX. Whenever I try to update it, it says something about version not verified. I googled and this seems to be an error with certain XP update/fix. I tried uninstalling them but still no go.
The other reason why I would like to be able to make images and recover when necessary, besides the hassle, is activation. You can only activate so many times online within certain time-frame. Since I swap hardware a lot, sometimes it asks for reactivation so I need to save my "credit".

Hard core Rikki, it says Trinity Rescue Kit supports "clone Windows installations over the network", how exactly does that work? I googled before I posted, and all the opensource tools seem to only support such method instead of recovery from DVDs.

Thanks for all your inputs.

[Kraelis]

Originally Posted by Hard core Rikki

Quoting by preference and featureset:

1 - Acronis True Image (moneeey!)
2 - Trinity Rescue Kit (a liveCD, literraly, nice. freeee! Download it from HERE)
3 - Norton Ghost (moneeey!)

Cool! Thanks for Trinity. I've been looking for one myself.