Maximum PC

Guys, I need your input, please.

Presently I use XP Home SP3. Later this week, I am going to install Win 7 Pro 32bit and go for a dual-boot setup.

My boot drive is a 160GB WD SATA drive, with 150GB usable.
50GB for XP ("C"), and the other 100GB will be used for Win 7 ("I").

I would like to back up the entire drive to an image on another HD in case of disaster, preserving whatever MBR and boot loaders are needed to get things up and running.

I would like to make two images for recovery... my present one with XP and the other empty but formatted partition (so I could start all over with Win 7 if I wanted to), and one made later with XP and Win 7 fully installed.

My questions are:

1. Would I be able to write my XP-only and unused partition image over my dual boot Win 7 install? Would that XP-only image overwrite the later dual boot loader with my present XP-only one (which is what I want, really)?

2. Does making a disk image preserve boot loaders?

3. Which software would be better for this: Macrium Reflect Free, or Acronis True Image WD Edition as supplied by WD for my boot drive?

I'm not interested in incremental backups, nor am I interested in only backing up each individual partition. I want to keep this as simple as I can and back up the entire drive for disaster recovery.

Any input welcome, and thanks.

Yes, when you restore an image, the whole disk image is written to the whole disk.


Yes, a disk image copies the whole disk byte for byte.


Don't know. I've had good luck with Clonezilla (use the default settings) doing partition image backups/restores (I assume it will work just as well for full disk images).


I'd suggest doing partition backups, since you'd save 100GBs. Also, doing partition backups is not much more difficult than full image ones (choose slightly different options and do one extra backup).

Mag, thank you... that's exactly what I need to know.

One thing about backup images... both programs I mention don't copy the entire disk byte-for-byte... they only copy the data that's actually written. Empty space, swapfiles, hibernation files are excluded from the images, and compression is optional. This is why my present 50GB C partition presently only takes up ±12GB worth of backup images with zero compression. With a Win7 install, this complete disk image may go up to, what, 50, 60GB? I have plenty of space for that.

When I have used Macrium to restore C: drive images, I must have done something wrong, because the other partition I: always ended up as unallocated and unformatted space, wiping the data I had there. I always have had to go into Disk Management and reformat and assign the drive letter, then manually copy the files I had stored there from a folder backup. I guess I should have used Macrium to make an image of that partition, too and then restore it. Live and learn!

Thank you again.

I'll double check my information to make sure it's entirely accurately.

Just a follow-up question, can we apply Linux and Windows in dual boot as well? Thanks.