Drive Image Pro has long offered two features that no one else has: the excellent PartitionMagic and the boot manager tool. PartitionMagic lets you convert partitions from one format to another, such as from FAT to FAT32, NTFS or HPFS. Only HPFS conversions can't be reversed.

Improved Conversions

In the past, the conversion from FAT to FAT32 was like an old medical joke, "Operation successful; patient dead." While the conversion worked, Microsoft Windows 98 wouldn't boot afterward. Now the conversion works completely, and it is much quicker than Microsoft's bundled conversion program. PartitionMagic can also recognize and manipulate Linux partitions. New options let you distribute any unused disk space between the partitions on your hard drive. The overall layout of PartitionMagic has improved, so the ease of use is much better.

PowerQuest provides DOS and Windows 9x versions of PartitionMagic. They are visually identical. However, the Windows 9x version has to reboot your PC into DOS before it can work on the disk structure. This means you can't install the Windows version on a server--when the PC boots into DOS mode, it can't reach a network copy of PartitionMagic.

The old boot manager has been replaced with BootMagic. PartitionMagic and BootMagic let me install multiple OSes on a hard drive and select which I wanted to use at boot time. Unlike the old boot manager, BootMagic does not require a dedicated partition. As a result, you can install four OSes on a hard drive, where boot manager allowed only three.

PowerQuest has finally added multicasting to Drive Image Pro, calling it PowerCasting. This feature lets you send a single image to several computers at the same time. This reduces the overhead of using multiple server/client-based file transfers. To implement PowerCasting, PowerQuest has a PowerCast server and a PowerCast client. The server can run on any Windows 95/98/NT PC, and the client can run on any Intel-compatible platform. The PowerCast server is simple compared with Symantec Corp.'s Ghost multicasting console. As in Ghost, scheduling in Drive Image is through the Windows' Scheduled Tasks.

However, unlike Ghost, the PowerCast server can handle only one task at a time. PowerQuest's technical support said the PowerCast server was designed to move as much data over the wire as quickly as possible, and that it makes extreme demands on the processor. As a result, you're advised to run additional copies on other machines to help keep the PowerCast server from bogging down. The PowerCast server can be set to wait before imaging until the system manager clicks the "Go" button or a selected number of PowerCast clients have connected to the server. Since most systems managers will need to perform different imaging tasks at the same time, I'd like to see the PowerCast server made more capable in this regard.

A welcome new addition to Drive Image Pro is the boot-disk builder, which can build disks for PowerCast, Novell NetWare, Windows NT and standalone use. Better yet, a single boot disk can support a number of NICs. The disk builder handles multiple NICs very well--better than any other product I've seen. Adding NICs to the system also is very easy and menu-driven, requiring only a driver disk from the vendor. I added NICs with no problems.

Another improved feature of Drive Image Pro 4.0 is DeltaDeploy, a snapshot-based software-distribution package. What makes it especially handy is it can automatically install its client agent on your client PCs. Microsoft's WinTop utility showed that DeltaDeploy was well-behaved, using very few processor resources when it wasn't deploying software and less than 200 KB of memory.

The DeltaDeploy installation lets you automatically install the DeltaDeploy agent through the system login script, which means the systems manager doesn't have to visit each computer on the network to install the software. The DeltaDeploy Manager lets you stage software to be sent to clients and select which computers to send it to. The manager discovers the computers on your network and lets you group them in collections. You can send an update to all the computers in accounting, for instance. The boot-disk creator let me save the boot disk as a virtual bootable floppy, which the DeltaDeploy could send to the client PCs. The PCs would then reboot to the network using the virtual boot floppy image.

The actual imaging program, Drive Image Pro, is also improved. It recognizes Linux partitions, though I wish it recognized FreeBSD as well. It has a smoother interface and is easier to use than earlier versions. It can automatically break image files into subfiles of selected size, a boon for systems managers who need to put images in CD-ROM drives.

The Drive Image File Editor has also been enhanced. It let me extract files from disk images and combine disk images for special purposes, such as creating a master disk image that contains several operating systems. Earlier versions required that each image file have an index before it could access the image, and creating an index was time consuming. The current version lets many operations proceed without an index and can quickly create an index if needed.

Installing Drive Image Pro was straightforward but required four separate installations from two CDs. I'd rather have installed from a single CD. When I rebooted my client PCs, DeltaDeploy was automatically installed on them. I then used a NetWare client boot disk to let two client machines access the copy of Drive Image Pro on my NetWare server and create images of two machines in the test lab on my server. I then wiped the hard disks and restored the images. As expected, the systems came up and ran as if nothing had happened. Next, using the DeltaDeploy Manager, I staged the boot-disk image to the two machines and ordered them to reboot.

The machines downloaded the boot-disk images, rebooted and began to wait for a PowerCast session to start. I told the PowerCast server to PowerCast one of the PC's images as soon as two clients connected. Seconds later, the two PCs connected to the server, and the transmission was under way. The on-screen display claimed an average of slightly more than 100 MB per minute transferred. Once the images had been copied, the PCs rebooted again and came up on the same Windows 98 image. The process was quick and easy.

Too Much, Too Soon?

A lot has been added in a short amount of time, and the integration isn't quite where I'd like to see it. Four different folders were added to my task bar during testing, and it wasn't always clear which program I should use. While parts of Drive Image Pro are smoother than Ghost's, Ghost's overall package is more refined.

For shops using earlier versions of Drive Image Pro, this upgrade is a must. For shops using competing products, the issue is less clear; the cost of migrating image files is high in time and money. Drive Image Pro 4.0 is a strong contender. The competitors require a dedicated system partition, which greatly increases costs, while Drive Image Pro has much less ability to apply low-level system changes to do post-imaging customization.

Mike Avery is the founder of Gunnison Territory Network Consultants, specializing in network design, management and administration. Send your comments on this article to him at mavery@mail.otherwhen.com.