Disk Images

Disk Image is a mirror of your logical drive or physical device that is stored in one file. This can be useful when you want to backup the contents of the whole drive, and restore it or work with it later. Before you start recovering the deleted files, it may be a good idea to create a Disk Image for this drive, if you have enough space at another drive. Why? Because if you do something wrong while recovering the files (for example, recovering them onto the same drive could destroy their contents), you still will be able to recover these deleted files and folders from the Disk Image that you have wisely created.

Active@ UNDELETE provides extensive functionality to operate with Disk Images. You can create image of either Logical disk, Device or Partition. Save it as one large file or split on image chunks with size you prefer for later use.

When you creating Disk Image, it stores in at least two files: one is Configuration file and the second - actual image body file. If you decide to save disk image chopped on peaces (chunks) then image body files can be as many as its required to save data.

Example: (create Drive Disk Image of size 7,84 Gb with options to make it with 1Gb chunks)

	   MyImage.dim	        - Logical Drive Image configuration file
	   MyImage.000	  1 441 Kb	- First chunk of image body
	   MyImage.001	  1 441 Kb	- Second chunk of image body
	   MyImage.002	  1 071 Kb	- And last chunk of image body
    

Creation of Disk Images

1. Start Active@ UNDELETE and select the drive, device or partition you want to create an image.
2. Run the Create Disk Image wizard by doing one of the following:

• Click the Create Disk Image button on the toolbar, or
• Click Tools > Create Disk Image in command toolbar, or
• Right-click the selected drive, and click Create Disk Image on the context menu

3. Follow the instruction of this wizard

Note

Configuration file for Disk Images has .DIM extension by default.

Important

• The Target Location for the drive images must always be on other drive.
• File systems FAT16 and FAT32 do not support file sizes larger than 2GB and 4GB respectively. In these file systems is not possible to create a disk image file for a drive as it is likely to grow larger than 2GB (or 4GB). The solution in this case is to use a target location formatted under the operating system Windows NT/2000/XP and NTFS or create Disk Image split in chunks by appropriate size.

Open Disk Images

To open a previously created Drive Image:

1. Start Active@ UNDELETE
2. Run the Open Disk Image wizard by doing one of the following:

• Browse to location, where previously created Disk Image was saved, locate and Double-click on Disk Image configuration file with extension .DIM.
  
  Note
  Disk image configuration file emphasized in Active@ UNDELETE explorer by special icon:
• Click the Open Disk Image button on the toolbar , or
• Click Tools > Open Disk Image in command toolbar

3. Follow the instruction of the wizard started to open Disk Image
4. If Disk Image opens successfully, it will appear as Disk Image node in either Logical Drives or Physical Devices tree and will be ready for all tasks applicable for Logical Drive? Physical Device or Partition.

See Also

Create Disk Image wizard | Open Disk Image wizard

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Making a hard drive image