Freeware of the Week: ImgBurn

For this edition of Freeware of the Week, I am featuring a great disc image utility called ImgBurn. It’s a great utility that allows you to burn an image to a disc, make an image from a disc, or make an image from files on your computer. Now that they’ve added a new “welcome screen,” it’s easier than ever.

Check out ImgBurn’s Homepage or visit the download page.

ImgBurn will burn any cd image type that you will encounter. From the official website: “ImgBurn supports a wide range of image file formats - including BIN, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI.”

ImgBurn has especially had a great impact on me as a systems administrator and here’s why. It has shell integration, so you can just right-click an image file in Explorer, click “Burn using ImageBurn”, and bam!, you’re burning it. It also recognizes my CD burners better than any other software that I have used. Windows XP’s built-in CD burning software pretty much never recognizes my drives as burners while Nero and ISO Recorder (an ISO burning tool that I would recommend secondary to ImgBurn) will correctly identify my drives as having burning capabilities about 2/3 of the time. ImgBurn, on the other hand, hasn’t let me down yet. That’s not to say it will never happen. On the 10 computers or so that I have tested it on, though, it’s worked.

If you regularly burn or create CD images, I would highly recommend ImgBurn. It’s lightweight, it works well, and it’s free.

Freeware of the Week: DriveImage XML

I’ve decided that I need something to write about on a regular basis, and that I should probably start writing some positive blog postings before I turn emo, and start slashing my wrists. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m going to try to recommend free software every week that has made my life easier. For the purposes of this series, “Freeware” software refers to free, closed source software; and open source software – no “shareware,” “trialware,” or “are-you-seriously-charging-money-for-this-ware.”

For “Freeware of the Week” #1, I’ve decided to review an awesome drive imaging program called DriveImage XML – an awesome disk imaging tool. You can find official information here, and a direct download link here.

If you are looking for an application to make a quick, one-time backup of your hard disk or transfer a partition between hard disks, look no further, DriveImage XML is for you. Official features are: Backup logical drives and partitions to image files; Browse these images, view and extract files; Restore these images to the same or a different drive; Copy directly from drive to drive; and Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler.

DriveImage XML is great for all of the aforementioned reasons, but the most important feature to me (besides being free), is the ability to restore an image to a destination partition that’s larger than the source partition. Most disk imaging and recovery software that I’ve seen out there will take the entirety of the destination partition, and write to it as if it was the same size as the source partition, essentially shrinking your capacity.

Here’s a specific example as to why that’s useful: I had a user with a 75GB hard drive, who was running out of disk space. At this point, I would normally just throw in a second hard drive, but he had some retarded HP workstation that had absolutely no space for a second hard drive. Now what do I do? I could have copied all of his files to the network, thrown the new hard disk in, installed Windows, re-install all of his apps, and so on, or I could partition the disk in to two parts, and use a traditional backup program like NTBACKUP to transfer the data to a partition of equal size to the source partition. After a little research, I found DriveImage XML. I threw his old 75GB HDD into an external drive enclosure, and used DriveImage XML to copy an image of the disk over to my workstation. I then swapped that disk out for the new 320GB disk, and after formatting it, I restored the image, now utilizing all available disk space.

I did have to do the hocus pocus and sprinkle some chicken blood on the disk to get it to boot properly, but that’s a story for another time, and I’ll write about it later if anyone cares.

That’s it for this week. I hope you give DriveImage XML a shot, and let me know how it goes!