Clone vs. image

[Al Pollock]

Hello people....Is an image of a hard drive the same as if you cloned it . Can you make and image of a HD then format and then restore by way of an image...

DUh !!

[bailey]

yes and yes, the only differance is with the clone, your going from one hard drive to the other hard drive, and with the image, you actually have a copy of the hard drive, usally on a dvd media.
but they both do basicly the same thing.

[kilgoretrout]

The terminology is probably not as precise as it should be and may vary depending on what software you are using to do the imaging/cloning. In the software I've used, the distinction between imaging a hard drive and cloning a hard drive boils down to when cloning, the mbr is imaged along with all the partitions on the drive and with imaging a hard drive, the mbr is not imaged, but rather just the partitions.
The mbr of a hard drive is the first 512 bytes(i.e. the first sector) which contains a the bootloader(if any) and the partition table which contains the partition info for all partitions on the hard drive. You would normally use the cloning operation when copying a hard drive over to a new hard drive. That way, the partition table would be copied over to the new drive and create the exact same partition structure on the new drive before dumping the data from the old drive onto the new drive. also the bootloader would be copied over to the new drive if the old drive was a bootable drive. Without that bootloader the new drive would not boot.
When you are just backing up an existing drive, you would normally use the imaging operation anticipating that you would be restoring the image to the same drive if necessary where the mbr would already be intact with the partition table and bootloader.

[bailey]

a image of a hard drive would be just that, a duplicate image of the entire hard drive including the said boot loader and mbr.

the question was not asking about backups.

[glc]

For all practical purposes, an image and a clone are identical - it's just a clone is an exact copy where an image is an exact copy compressed into a single file or set of files. A clone can be installed and booted up, an image would have to be restored to a blank drive using the imaging software's restore process, which can usually be run from a bootable CD. The advantage to images is you can store more "stuff" on the hard drive you are using for storing images, or you can use alternate media (CD, DVD, etc.) for the image.

[Al Pollock]

Thanks People, Hey Glc got me one of those ez bus dt's with the software stuffed a 250 maxtor 16 mb casche in it ....Awesome...........

[glc]

Good deal - and you can use the EZ Gig software to either clone or image. You can do either by booting with the CD or by installing the software in Windows.