Rating: 
Summary: Please dont buy this garbage.
Review: So you have lost some data due to hard drive failure or accidentally messing something up. That was me 10 months ago.
I started my "PowerQuest" for backup software. TahDah! Powerquest Drive Image 7, from a reputable online retailer. I read all the reviews and although hesitant plunked my $70 bucks down and got it. After reading all the info I could based on the amazon reviews here and the symantec support website, I proceded to install. All went well and I updated to the latest patch and made my first image. Great! Then I got the bright idea of trying out the backup. So I deleted a couple things and proceded to reboot to the backup cd set (cd-r spanning 5 disks.) All went fine and 25 min later I was rebooting, well I tried to reboot. Ended up wiping out what I set out to protect. After the 3hr rebuild process I decided not to try again. Symantec promises a 60 day satifaction guarentee so I asked for my money back following proper procedure as outlined on their support site. It's been 16 weeks and now support has forwarded my refund inquires to corporate (promised 48 hrs response time) its been a week and still no response to my refund inquiries. Glad I photocopied all materials I sent for the refund. Buyer beware.
Rating:
Summary: Does not support Win XP
Review: There seems to be no way to upgrade a hard drive using Windows XP with Drive Image 7. Numerous attempts, even with attempting to reinstall XP ended in failure. I finally used Acronis True Image 6 and accomplished the upgrade on the first attemp.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent backup software
Review: This is about the 4th version of Drive Image that I've run over the last few years and it is easily the most impressive.I upgraded from Drive Image 5 to DI 7 a few weeks ago and have been steadily wowed by the new version. Backups I've made with this software have now saved me twice -- once when I got a little too zealous with some file cleanup efforts, and once when an major software update failed in the middle. In both cases, I simply restored my previously saved backup image and within minutes everything was fine again. The single most important new feature is the ability to backup and restore while XP is active so you have easy access to network drives, USB drives, SCSI drives, full DMA support, etc -- all items that used to be problematic when backing up under DOS in previous versions. The DMA support (under Windows) and the new version boosted my backup speeds from one hard drive to another from 140MB/min to about 750MB/min. It's astonishing -- a 4 gigabyte backup takes 3 minutes on my 1.7ghz P4 machine with 2 IDE hard drives! DI7 now has the ultimate backup feature that I've been lusting after for many years -- unattended scheduling of backups. Previous versions allowed for backups to be scheduled but they had to be done when Windows wasn't active, or they couldn't include the system drive. Both restrictions are gone with this version -- simply set up a backup schedule and the Drive Image service will "wake up" and perform your backup with the OS active, whether you are logged in or not. All you have to do is clear off some hard drive space on another drive, sit back, and your drive will just automatically back itself up! Fabulous! Some of the other posters have touched on the downsides to the software -- DI is sensitive to the type of drives you are using -- it has limits with size and type (no Serial ATA yet, according to another poster). Previous versions were limited to 120GB drives, this one is limited to 160GB drives (I believe). Plenty big enough for me but it's something to be aware of. I was a little surprised initially when I went to restore my backed up system drive because I had to restart the system and boot off the DI 7 CD -- but this makes sense as you wouldn't want to wipe out the disk image of your currently running system drive. That would be a bit like sawing off the tree limb that you're standing on -- it's hard to fault PowerQuest for this. I also encountered a minor bug when backing up a drive to a CD after turning on the "maximum compression" setting -- it got to the final stages of burning the CD and then reported that an "unknown exception" had occurred. The problem vanished when I repeated this at the "default compression" setting. I highly recommend this software. This has been the most exciting software upgrade for me for the last year -- way to go PowerQuest!
Rating:
Summary: Problem with Framework
Review: This program must us Microsoft's Framework Program it will ask to load it if you don't have it. You then can load the Drive Image 7 program. In my case I found that at that point I needed 256 MB of Ram free for the progam to work. I have that on my Comp. But Because some of it is used in my video card I had to put in a 512 MB RAM card. When the card was put in at the comp. shop system crash. When In boot mode He found that Frame work was the problem. once it was removed the comp. worked. When I got home I found that any time I used Help I would get an error Message about framework and the same thing would happen if I tried to down load a Program. I had to goto the Microsoft Windows Update Page to load v1.1.4322 framework just to stop the message from coming up I can remove the old frame work but if I then try to remove the new framework same error messages. Space it takes up is 37.9 MB and I don't use the program.
Rating:
Summary: This software killed my machine
Review: This software is hazardous. I had a perfectly good working Win XP Pro, fast, high-end machine. Now I have a machine that takes forever to boot, if it boots, and has too many NEW problems to mention that all arrived with my installation of this software. All I wanted to do was upgrade my harddrive now I am forced to re-install everything and start from scratch just to get a good configuration. I have used Ghost in the past and it was simple. Not only did it kill my machine but even with my machine booted with the last known good configuration the software does not work at all. I am a Systems Analyst and I have repaired, configured, tested, installed many machines and software and in all my days I have never seen such an outright piece of trash....well except for maybe the early days of Microsoft patches where you always made sure to back up your system first or face the consequences. Buyer beware!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Powerquest Drive Image 7 for Windows 2000 and XP
Review: Thus far I have been happy with Drive Image 7. In the past I used Norton Ghost and it worked fine on FAT 32 hard drives on older Windows platforms. But Norton Ghost is useless for making images of hard drives formatted in NTFS, which is used in XP Pro and usually on Windows 2000. To date it has worked fine, it is easy to use (user friendly), makes images very fast, and has no limits on the size of image files. Norton Ghost would span files larger than 2 gigabytes. Considering that the NTFS filing system is becoming more common, Drive Image 7 satisfies the need to image hard drives in NTFS.
Rating:
Summary: Drive Image 7 - Not the right stuff
Review: Try Drive Image 7 and didn't work. Upgraded to 7.03 the same error message.
Description: An error occurred creating a backup of drive C:\. The Virtual Volume Imaging driver (pqv2i.sys) is not present on the system.
Error Description: An error occurred creating a backup of drive C:\. The Virtual Volume Imaging driver (pqv2i.sys) is not present on the system.
Error EC8F000C: Cannot find the Virtual Volume Image driver. Error 00000002: The system cannot find the file specified.
Details: Unspecified error: Cannot find the Virtual Volume Image driver. Error 00000002: The system cannot find the file specified.
Details: Unspecified error
Since I opened the software - can not return it and I'm stuck with something that doesn't work. :-(
Rating:
Summary: Warning: Bug in Drive Image 7.0
Review: Warning! An apparent bug in DI7 prevents some .PSD and .PDF files from being restored correctly from a DI7 backup. This affects only individual file restores, rendering this option useless. Full restores (of the entire drive image) work properly. Unless this bug problem is resolved, I cannot give DI7 the 5-star rating it deserves. I communicated with the PowerQuest DI7 product manager up until about 2 months ago, and then communications stopped. This may have been around the time Symantec acquired the product. I will assume that the bug is real and PowerQuest/Symantec has been unable to fix it. I am not sure why only some .PDF and .PSD files fail to restore correctly. File size doesn't seem to be a factor, though more large files than small ones have failed. Not every .PDF or .PSD file fails to restore. This effectively renders DI7 to be no different than DI5, and no better than Symantec Ghost. My advice - Don't spend your money to upgrade to or purchase DI7 until PowerQuest/Symantec provides the necessary bug fix.
Rating: 
Summary: Be Warned!!
Review: When it's working, this is a wonderful product. If you are using XP and backing up to a drive within your computer, then you should be fine. If you are thinking to backup to another drive in a home network, then the documentation bares little resemblance to the reality. There are three sources of info: 1) The PDF manual on the install disk 2) The online 'knowledgebase' and 3)Help on the program itself. There are several option you can only select or edit upon installation, so reading the documentation is important but still inadequate, with choices and boxes not referred to anywhere. Choose the wrong one, and you're back to square one. In addition, unless you are *very* intimate with XP file sharing, groups and networks, you will be asked to pay support $29.95 for them to "teach you" Windows networking, and despite their assurances, there is no direct references to these in the Microsoft knowledgebase. This is very frustrating and Symantec buying Powerquest has left me to the whims of a "More than my job's worth" "Support Nazi" on the end of the support phone. Wouldn't even walk me through installation!
Very sad. They should just charge another $20 for the product (it's worth it when working) and have done with it. I refuse to be nickeled and dimed to death.
Rating:
Summary: Works great. Easy to use.
Review: Works as advertised. I took me 14 mins to create a image of my harddrive to an external firewire drive. The drive had 15 GB of data, and the compressed image was 8.5GB. I wanted to test it to make sure that the product actually works, so I've booted off the included recovery CD, all my controllers were recognized even thou my C: drive is all SCSI and mad up of 3 drives in RAID 0, while the D: drive is a IDE RAID 0 too. The firewire drive was recognized too, so I was able to select the backup image and strat the restore. After 20 min I was able to reboot my newly recovered drive. The only issue I had is that I use a new motherboard that includes the Intel 1000/100BaseT network chip-set, and the PowerQuest recovery disk did not recognize it, so would've not been able to do a restore by using a network stored image. However this should not be a issue since in the online manual there is information on how to load drivers at boot time, I haven't used the procedure for now. On more thing, this product is extremlly easy to use. All functions, including the recovery disk use the WindowsXP intreface, not DOS.
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