“One of the paradoxes of PCs is that they make duplicating
individual disk files almost effortless, but they provide far less
help in copying entire systems, which can be a problem when you’re
installing numerous new computers with the same configuration.
PowerQuest’s Drive Image Pro 3.01 (DIPro) comes to the rescue by
making it easy to copy an entire disk drive to either another
partition or a single “image” file, both of which can then be
copied to other drives.”
“DIPro actually consists of a number of programs for working
with disk partitions and image files, including PowerQuest’s
PartitionMagic Pro 5.0, the beloved application that resizes
partitions without destroying your data. While DIPro is a DOS-based
program, it now handles Linux ext2 partitions as easily, and using
it to set up a dozen or so identical Linux workstations is barely
more difficult than copying a file.”
“DIPro can easily replicate a disk or partition to another
disk, but its real power is in using an intermediate image
file. An image file is normally smaller than the partition or
disk it was made from. Disk images can optionally be compressed,
further reducing their size. Once created, the image file can
be multicasted to all workstations on the network that are running
the PowerCasting client.”