How to create a Disk Image

Creating a Disk Image

A Disk Image is a mirror copy of your entire logical drive or physical device stored as set of files. It may be a good idea to create a Disk Image for a drive, if you have enough space on another drive.

You might ask, "Why should I create a Disk Image on a drive that holds my data?"

Here is the answer: If you do something wrong while attempting to recover the partition, you will be able to recover files and folders from the Disk Image using other last chance recovery tools like Active@ File Recovery.

A disk image consists of a configuration file (with an extension .DIM) and set of files having extensions .000, .001, .002 etc. By default Active@ Partition Recovery tries to create one file (chunk) for the whole volume/device.

However, if the target location is FAT, it may not be possible due to file system limitations. In this particular case disk image was split into several chunks and each file has a size of 2Gb. The content of the chunks can be RAW or RAW-Compressed, depending on the program settings.

To create a Disk Image:

  1. Start Active@ Partition Recovery and select a drive or physical device that you want to create an image for

  2. To open the Create Disk Image dialog box, do one of the following:

    • Click Create Image button on the toolbar
    • Right-click the selected item, and choose Create Image from the context menu

  3. In the Save In drop-down list, select another logical drive

  4. Browse to the folder where you want to save the Disk Image

  5. To give the Disk Image file a different name, type one in the File Name field

Watch the progress and wait while the drive's contents are copied to the new location. You may cancel the process of image creation anytime by clicking Stop.

Important! You must always create a Disk Image on a drive other than the source drive. Do not try to save a Disk Image of a drive onto itself.