Hi guys, I'm having a streak of comp failure recently so I have to frequently install OSs. Since I'm not using just one OS, the entire thing is really getting me sick. So I want to find a tool, preferably bootable from a usb pen drive that can easily mirror/map certain partition to another hard drive.

Ok. Why am I asking here? Can't I just google? Well the thing is, back in the good old 120G HDD era, there was this nifty tool called Norton Ghost that allows you easily compile an entire partition to a single Gho file. I downloaded the latest trial version, version 15 I believe and to my surprise, such feature is completely gone!

I think it's understandable as a WIN7/8 system is starkly different from NT4.0 based systems, and restoring one partition may not make your comp bootable. Boot sectors may have been stored in some system reserved partition. But that's entirely just my speculation.

I've also googled other tools, but no luck. What do I mean by that? There is this tool called Easeus that would allow you to back up a partition — to an unallocated hard disk space. So if you want to use it, you might wanna fisrt resize an existing, fully functional partition to a smaller one so extra space could be spared and be "downgraded" into an unallocated space, which is kinda stupid, and resizing a partition has always been a risky business.

I've also found partimage, but it needs a linux environment and I have to mannually compile it.

I'm not really out of ideas but I'm really tired of wasting my time looking for a solution because I don't really know where to look.

Note that I want to clone one or 2 partitions from an SSD into a SINGLE file to a conventional drive using NTFS file system (I suppose it supports single 1024G file, right? My partitions are all well under 100G)

So can anyone please be so kind as to help me?

Not 100% sure what you are trying to achieve, but clonezilla is what I use, very easy, and has a bootable CD available or easy instructions to load a bootable USB

http://clonezilla.org/

you can clone whole drives or partitions.

It is free.

BTW, depending if your partitions have OSs or not would maybe make it harder. Sometimes it is better to vary what you want to do or how you do it so as to not go insane. Another option is use a Physical-2-virtual converter and use VMware with a virtual disk.

Not sure What I'm trying to do? I want a Preinstalled Environment which I can boot from USB, and this P.E. can perform at least one function: clone a partition at my choosing into a file, saved at a location that is at my choosing. Simple as that.

CloneZilla will do but I guess it takes some time to wrap my head around.

Ok, I was thinking you wanted to use the Pre-Installed environment as your OS..

Not much to wrap yor head around..

1.download ISO and burn it.
2. Put Clonezilla disk in the PC you want to image, and boot from it
3. press enter to load into default and basically, enter, enter, ent for default keyboard.
4. choose from intuitive options, write image, make an image etc.
5. choose the source
6. choose the destination

Same for writing the image back to a PC

Thank you for your help, but Cz doesn't really work...

Any other way around? Have you used Norton Ghost before? It used to come with a PE that you can boot into (from a floppy disk, so that's a huge problem as floppy disks are completely obsolete now, and the old Ghost, like 9.0 or so might not support large files, like 40gigs). The latest Norton Ghost kinda removed that PE as an option, a very confusing and unwise thing to do if you ask me.

I'm gonna see if old, but not so old versions of Ghost still has that.

Also, I don't know if I'm getting it wrong or I just discovered a bug for CloneZilla, the thing is, if you restore a partition to a different harddrive, that is, if you clone partition A of HDD1 to a file, then mirror/restore this file to an empty HDD2, and although all the files appear on HDD2, you can't really boot from it.

I'm guessing you can only restore a image back to the EXACT SAME harddrive where you cloned from? Doesn't work on a different harddrive? Seems to be quite unreasonable. Just consider if you were a tech working for a company that has 100 computers with identical hardwares. You have to install OSs for every 1 of them?

I do work in tech. I use Clonezilla to restore to different HDDs all the time, and they boot.

example. I took an Image of a WinXP installation on an 80GB HDD and restored it to a different PC with a different brand of HDD, a 160GB. boots and works fine.

IMHO, a couple of VHD's would be a more manageable option.

The easiest way to do this is to use Acronis. I'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned it. Depending upon the operating system you will also have to include the system partition in order to make sure it boots. You cant just take a copy of the partition which contains the main windows 7 for example as all the boot files are stored in the system partition.