Often we want to clone entire hard drive for quick installations on multiple systems, or to save our critical data in aging hard drive. There are many commercial as well as free solutions to clone the hard drives. I tested about 4 free solutions, each one having its own pro can cons. Following software passed all tests and is an absolute gem for cloning hard drives.
DriveImage XML is a free hard drive cloning software that has some great features at par with commercial solutions. The software allows you to backup, browse and restore the drive images with ease. It also offers direct drive to drive cloning 
DriveImage XML can only run on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista as per official manual, but I have tested it on Windows 200 Professional and it runs fine without any glitch 
. During backup process, two files are made viz.. .XML containing the drive description and .DAT containing the actual data as raw binary image. During cloning process, you can also lock the partition so that no unnecessary updates occur during the cloning process.
Free Updates by Email Free updates by RSS (What is RSS?)
