WHEN NOT TO IMAGE
by Mike Hogan
Norton Image is one of those Norton Utilities you want to use carefully because it has an impact on very important information about your drive. Image takes a snapshot of the critical files on your hard drive and overwrites your current IMAGE.DAT, so you don't want to overwrite healthy settings with those from a drive you suspect might be malfunctioning. That could be duplicating errors and could affect an attempted disk recovery later. And it can happen by accident.
Don't run Image in automatic mode. Specifically, DO NOT CLICK THE OPTIONS BUTTON AND CONFIGURE IMAGE TO RUN EVERY TIME YOU START UP WINDOWS. Norton SystemWorks shouldn't even offer this as an option, but it does. A few weeks or a few days from now, you will have forgotten the caveats about Image and, while distracted during the shutdown and bootups of a troubleshooting session, might let your machine automatically overwrite a good image with a bad one.
As a rule, don't use Image immediately after making repairs with Norton Disk Doctor or after restarting Windows from a failed session. If you're having disk trouble, don't use Speed Disk, which will image your drives after it's done. Of course, Speed Disk usually prompts you to run Norton Disk Doctor when it encounters problems, but you never know what will happen when a computer starts to go south.
Although you can run Image from a network, you cannot image a network drive--a failsafe measure.
In short, DON'T USE IMAGE AS A TROUBLESHOOTING UTILITY. Always make sure Windows and your drives are fully functional before imaging any disk. |
