Active@ Partition Recovery is a program for recovering lost, deleted or corrupted Partition Table entries in place (on the physical hard drive directly).
The image feature is available as a last resort when you suspect that the hard drive will physically malfunction and you want to capture the data off the drive before it fails and is no longer visible by the system itself.
The created image cannot be opened by Partition Recovery for scanning or restoring. You would be able to use Active@ File Recovery to open the image as a virtual drive to scan the contents and restore files or folders to a new drive.
Alternatively, you can restore the image to a new hard drive using Active@ Disk Image for Windows (only restores RAW uncompressed disk images).
Since the image is an exact copy of the original drive, it would also include the original logical problem. Partition Recovery would be used to correct the problem, in place on the new drive. In such cases it is often better to use Active@ File Recovery to restore files.