Disk Image
A disc image, also in computer terminology, is a virtual copy of a specific disk segment, such as the data portion or the operating system sector of a hard disk or of an entire hard drive, including all its files and information. A user may create an image of one or more partitions on a single hard drive with the backing up of these partitions prior to the start of the Windows setup. The Pa-Software utility allows Windows users to create these images and more. This utility was designed by Paolo Bellarino of IT Solutions Networking, Ltd., in order to allow Windows users to create a backup of the registry, system files, configuration settings, user profiles and more. One can even restore the operation system from an image of another OS such as Linux, Mac OS or Solaris. This Pa-Software utility has been reported to work well with various distributions like Fedora, Red Hat, Mandriva, and many more.
The main advantages of creating a disk image in Windows are that it allows the OS to save system disk space, and also to access information that used to be stored on the hard drive but which are now saved on the hard drive. This feature is especially useful when operating systems crash or experience problems. For example, a Windows XP computer could lose unsaved information if it crashes, while a Mac computer will not be able to recover unsaved information from a hard drive that has been formatted. If you want to recover unsaved information from a recent system reboot, for example, you can use the Disk Image Restore feature in Windows in order to create a disk image. In this case, the user does not need to be in front of the operating system in order to perform the recovery operation; the operating system will automatically perform the recovery operation on its own.
The Windows CD-ROM is a very popular application program for creating CD-R (Composite) disks. CD-Rs are blank, plastic media that contains one or more bits of data. They can contain up to 4.2 megabytes of information and are created by the Microsoft Windows CD-ROM application program. A typical CD-ROM contains a single word or a collection of words, where the most commonly used word is usually the program title.
