I have used Partition Magic since about version 2 and think Powerquest has a great product in PM. Like you say, it is not their product for disk cloning/imaging. Since I had a good experience with PM, I bought a fairly early version of Drive Image, but was very disappointed. It failed repeatedly. As a result I bought Ghost (just the "personal edition") and have used this many times with good results. I make image file snapshots of my company laptop so I can restore to an earlier state if things get hosed up, and I have used Ghost many times in conjunction with PM to migrate to larger drives and for "Cheap RAID" -- basically cloning a drive to a backup every so often (boot the machine from a floppy with Ghost PE and clone. I think even half-full 45GB drives took less than an hour).

I'd hope that the newer version of Powerquest's Drive Image/Copy are much improved.

Related to a recent Off-topic topic of recovering a RAID 0 config, I'd comment that I would not trust anything critical to the now-common on-board RAID solutions, even in RAID 1 or 0+1 configurations. Promise, High Point, etc. are all primarily software RAID that depends on drivers read from the configured disks; if the relevant file systems and drivers get messed up, it seems that you run the risk of hosed RAID config. Likewise, I'm not sure I'd I'd put a critical NT/2000 system partition on software mirrored drives.

Not too many IDE hardware-only RAID solutions around. I have had great results with a DMA33-capable Arco Duplidisk for my Linux file server, but the Arco Duplidisk 2 (UDMA66-capable) I installed in a desktop had big problems (now documented by Arco but not yet fixed) with the Via chipset on that Tyan S1834D. 3ware has an IDE RAID controller series (Escalade?) that is in hardware, but the unit requires a PCI slot which Arco does not. Promise now has a (looks like hardware-only) followup to the FastTrak 100 called the SuperTrak 100 but it is over $300USD and also wants a PCI slot. The Arcos are ~$225-$250 and only need a connection to the IDE controller. For now, I am using just Cheap RAID on my desktop while I wait to see if Arco resolves the Via compatibility issue.

(Now, back to the topic!)

Jim