Rating: 
Summary: I would give zero stars if I could.
Review: I bought it because the magazine reviews said it was great and would work with Windows XP. I'm a software engineer with a lot of PC knowledge and experience and am considered an expert by many people. In five attempts to back-up different partitions to CD-R, only one attempt succeeded (a single partition that would fit on a single CD-R disk). The first failed attempt I attributed to the screen saver kicking on during the back-up, although, technically, it should not have failed because it uses UDF format for writing to CD-R; but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. It appears that, even though you can select multiple partitions for back-up, even if the multiple partitions would fit on a single CD-R, it will not let you. Neither the program nor documentation tells you this. I attributed the second failed attempt to putting in the same CD-R when backing-up the second partition. It does not verify the data until it completely finishes the back-up of the partition. By the time it realizes that a disk failed during a partition back-up, it's too late to re-write that disk. The third failure was disk three of a four CD-R back-up failing to be verified. The fourth failure had no logical reason for failing. Don't waste your money. Norton Ghost has not failed me yet. It may be more cumbersome to use in XP, but it's do-able.
Rating:
Summary: Drive Image Fails
Review: I first purchased Drive Image 6 a couple of years ago and when it failed to perform safe image copies Powerquest convinced me to upgrade to Version 2002. It has been more frustrating than V6. They make many claims but the features they promise don't always work. Backing up across a network is impossible, and accessing images after creation is not guaranteed. I made a backup of an XP machine prior to upgrading from Home to Professional, and when I encountered problems with the upgrade I couldn't open the backup image file. Their Knowledgebase is pathetic and doesn't even list the 2002 version as a choice. If you want reliability and good support, don't buy from Powerquest - you will be disappointed. They claim to safeguard your data but the program is unreliable so how safe is that? I wish I could give it a zero, but the lowest rating here is 1 star - but to me it is a real zero.
Rating: 
Summary: User Friendly Back up
Review: I had an unfortunate experience with an under-warranty Gateway running XP. To make a long story short, they eventually fixed it but only after re-installing XP (which they did not have to do). I was left with no software at all (even that which came with the computer since it was destroyed by a moving company). I determined this would not happen again. I purchased Drive Image 7 and it was the easiest program I ever used. Following their step by step instructions I tested to see if it would boot off the CD (it did) and backed up in no time to an external drive. You can even schedule backups and copy the backup to a CD. I wish I had this sooner. Best thing is you don't need to be a computer genius to use it.
Rating: 
Summary: Go for Acronis 6.0 or Ghost 2003 instead...
Review: I have last year's version, Drive Image 2002, and it was far less problematic than this version. I thought for sure the stripped down Windows environment that Drive Image 7 boots to would be worth it. I believe it's called the PQRE. That is pretty cool, but for me it wasn't worth it. I say that because whatever Drive Image 7 does on boot, i.e. seemingly tries to load before everything else...causing other programs and services not to load at all. My guess is that the V2i security that Drive Image 7 uses to secure back-ups might be part of the problem?! Nearly everytime I'd boot up it would boot as though everything was normal, get almost to the Windows XP loading screen, then restart again! After all of that restarting it would just flat out kill start-up routines initiated by some other services and programs. E.g. most of the time, in my experience, it would prevent ATI Launchpad from starting, Saitek profiler start would be killed, and finally Nero InCD wouldn't be loaded. It affected the Saitek utility so much that I'd be guaranteed of an error message when I finally got into Windows XP! The message was "Sorry, you were in the middle of something" with the option to send the error report to Microsoft. No need to send an error report to Microsoft, I've identified the problem...it's Drive Image 7!!! Sadly enough, I made the mistake of not thoroughly checking to see if this software comes with a 30-day money back guarantee! I searched through the minimal manual, and all over the product box to see if they did have a guarantee printed somewhere. No luck! So if you do decide to get this product make sure it's worth the risk to you because it seems as though you won't have a chance to get your money back if it doesn't work for you. If you want a slick, easy-to-use, imaging utility, try Acronis 6.
Rating:
Summary: Huge amount of problems
Review: I have used various versions of Drive Image for 4 years. All have had problems but version 7 has more problems than previous versions. I have encountered a number of the problems I have seen mentioned here. I just put on the upgrade to 7.3 (on a very stable Windows 2000 system), hoping it would fix some of the problems, and it instantly crashed my system and made my system unbootable!!! What an atrocious disgrace. And now that Symantec (Norton) has taken over the product and its support, there is virtually no support or help. The support on the web site is terribly lacking and almost useless. The error messages the product gives are often undocumented. Particularly bad, as mentioned by someone else, is that DI can create a backup image and say it is successful. But when it later views the image it says the image is invalid. That's as bad as it gets with backup software. The reason I still use Drive Image (I am back to using DI 5 as it is less error-prone than DI 7)is that I have had even bigger problems with Norton Ghost. I wish there was a good and reliable software product for making image backups, but haven't found one yet.
Rating:
Summary: Beware and listen to the warnings
Review: I ignored the warnings of others that I read here and ordered this. The Drive Image 7 product that I received from the Amazon.com seller had a big problem (old version perhaps?).
It created drive backups OK but when I tried to boot the product disk to load the "Power Quest Recovery Environment" to do a system restore it failed solid with TXTSETUP.OEM error 18.
Turns out that the product disk was burned with a directory that had its name truncated on the CDROM. Unbeliveable but true.
After editting a copy of the disk's image to correct things, and reburning it I have it working, but I now no longer feel I can trust this product to do the backup tasks that I bought it for.
Symantec web site wants money before helping you, so forget that option your all on your own.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed!
Review: I purchased DI 7 because of the accolades it supposedly received. I knew I was going to need it since I was going to be getting a new hard drive for my failing hard-drive in my Dell laptop. At first, I was impressed how easy it was to backup my C:/ drive from my laptop to an external firewire hard drive. I even tested the Recovery Environment as it suggested, and that seemed to work without a hitch. Then the day came that I replaced my old hard drive with a new hard drive. I started out doing a bare metal recovery as it touts it can do effortlessly.... It didn't work. It gave me an error that my hard drive was not readable. So, I thought, I could just reinstall XP and then restore everything after I had the basic OS up and running. I tried it that way, and same result. Nothing. I consider myself an advanced computer user.... I know how to partition, reformat drives, etc etc.... All I wanted was an application that would make my life easier as the software said it would. It turns out I wasted $69.00 on this usless software. I guess I'll keep looking for another drive imaging application, because Drive Image 7 isn't worth squat. Good luck.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed!
Review: I purchased DI 7 because of the accolades it supposedly received. I knew I was going to need it since I was going to be getting a new hard drive for my failing hard-drive in my Dell laptop. At first, I was impressed how easy it was to backup my C:/ drive from my laptop to an external firewire hard drive. I even tested the Recovery Environment as it suggested, and that seemed to work without a hitch. Then the day came that I replaced my old hard drive with a new hard drive. I started out doing a bare metal recovery as it touts it can do effortlessly.... It didn't work. It gave me an error that my hard drive was not readable. So, I thought, I could just reinstall XP and then restore everything after I had the basic OS up and running. I tried it that way, and same result. Nothing. I consider myself an advanced computer user.... I know how to partition, reformat drives, etc etc.... All I wanted was an application that would make my life easier as the software said it would. It turns out I wasted $69.00 on this usless software. I guess I'll keep looking for another drive imaging application, because Drive Image 7 isn't worth squat. Good luck.
Rating:
Summary: Never works with WinXP Home or Pro, but works with Win2K
Review: I purchased Drive Image 7.0 and installed it to my Windows XP Home edition machine. After it was installed, a message asked me to reboot the machine. It couldn't boot into Windows. I was forced to reverse back to last good configuration to boot into windows. Then I found that DI7.0 didn't work at all because a critical component (v2iprotector service) couldn't be installed or the machine would not boot into windows. I tried to upgrade to DI7.01 but no luck, still the same. Before it was rebooted, the v2iprotector service was installed but the machine would refuse to boot into windows if the service was installed. I then tried that on my Windows Pro machine and found the same problem. Norton antivirus reported an attempt to delete my hard disk boot sector. I didn't grant the permission to do that. If I didn't have Norton, my hard disk could have been deleted. What a piece of junk! Then I tried to install it on my Windows 2000 machine anticipating a complete crash. To my surprise, it was installed without any problem. However, when I tried to create an image on CD using the highly compressed format, it didn't work. The program created three CDs for my 3GB data on a hard disk. However, when I tried to restore my hard disk using the CDs, the program could not see the backup file. I had to use a portable external hard drive to do the image again. This time it worked perfectly: I created an image for my 3GB data using the standard image option then cloned a few Windows 2000 machines using the image. It took about an hour to clone a machine with 3GB data, but it worked. From the reviews, we know that this software is not stable. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. Buyers: be aware! Do a complete backup or make sure your recovery CDs are around before you try this product!
Rating:
Summary: Poor product and even worst support!
Review: I purchased Drive Image 7.0 to backup a 160G 3 partition hard drive on Windows 2000 pro. It only sees one partition, if you run a utility program from Power Quest it thinks the end cylinder is larger than the disk, but if you look at the data, it is the end cylinder from Power Quest that doesn't seem to support extended partitions larger than 137 GB. The main issue is that the Drive Image program doesn't report any errors, it just sees one partition. When I called for support, they were extremely un helpful, after downloading the latest version of the SW it still doesn't work. The problem is still not solved!
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