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Turning the clock back 20 years or so...

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In the course of doing some data recovery from an ancient Windows XP system from around 2003 I came across two PowerQuest Drive Image backup image files (C_Drive.pqi & C_Drive.002) that took me a little while to figure out what they were!

I eventually dug out an equally old CD copy of Norton (Symantec) Ghost 9.0 which was able to read these .PQI image files as Norton Ghost 9.0 was derived from Drive Image, and was able to export them into a single .V2I Ghost image file, which then could be restored to another IDE / PATA HDD and allowed more data to be recovered.

Out of interest after finishing up on the recovery, I installed Ghost 9.0 on XP SP3 and ran a couple of C: drive disk backups, both of which completed in 2 minutes 45 seconds each time!

After experiencing startup times for some recent Acronis versions much longer than 3 minutes, it was a revelation of just how fast tools like Ghost were!

The downside of playing again with Windows XP was the almost impossible task of finding programs that will work with it given it went out of support back in 2014, and add to that the factor that this particular machine has an Athlon processor without SSE2 support, so no antivirus available etc!

One final comment, in digging further in my tool bag, I found a copy Drive Image 4.0 on two 3.5" diskettes that boots into DOS 5 or 6 (I think).

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I was a great fan of Power Quest software. I suspect I still have installation files somewhere; somewhere I have installation files for various iterations of Norton Ghost, including a utility which converts old PowerQuest and Ghost backups to more recent Ghost format.  It is standalone is not installed, just run the exe file.

Ian