Anyone seen or heard of this? http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

They apparently have heard of BartPE, they have plugins for it on their site.

And "this program is currently distributed as freeware".

BTW The link to their BARTPE plugin cab is broken. But it can be found here: http://runtime.swmirror.com/

DriveImage_XML.cab

I tried the PE plugin CAB version which contained everything to install and run. It did backup my partition and it did restore it. Once restored I had to reboot to see it again. (thought I had lost it!) The partition is 4GB. Drive Image 6 backs it up to 1.15GB, DriveImage_XML backed it up to 1.32GB. The backup took 35 min using the Compressed option, the restore about 15.

It's a 1.4MB download and it uses XP's Volume Locking and Volume Shadow Services. It has a GUI interface and provides Backup, Restore, Drive to Drive and the ability to restore selected files capabilities. A minor caveat, it requires a screen resolution of at least 800x600. If started on a 600x480 display you can't get to the Next button. Doubt that will be much of a concern here.

BTW It runs from the CD. If you want it to keep a log the RAM drive can be used or a hd partition.

@Ed_P
I tried the program on differnet machines, and it works without problems !!!
this is a very nice and good program, and so small.
and the best, it is freeware !

Joshua

Works fine as a plugin in when booted from CD.
But I found no way to see the "Next" button when installed to HD and therefore could not test it in real XP.
Any idea?

philon

This tool could give a new twist to unattended installs. Did this tonight:

1) Mounted my custom xp build in VM and installed the OS to the point where it copies all files during textmode and reports "computer is restarting" I then rebooted the Virtual machine and PXE booted it into BartPE via TFTP server ( in am .SDI file)

2) Did a drive copy with this program to a network share. This happens extremely fast at a total time of only *1:30. (*inside VM and with Raid0 raptors)

3) I then then started up the Virtual machine and PXE booted it with Bart again. The documentation shows that the drive need not be formatted, and this is what was done. DISKPART was ran to clean the disk, recreate the partition and assign the letter C: I did not format it and it was reported as a fat16 partition by the imaging software in the following step.

4) I then reloaded the image created in step 1. The total time to pull down this image was aproximately *2:30.

If the power down to the virtual machine in step 1 was timed correctly you will be greeted with the T38 portion of windows setup and install will commence.

Chief benefits:

(Huge Caveat, the following has only been done in VM and speeds will change for the slower in real world applications)

1) SIZE! The image file which was created by this program was 672 meg. The windows XP ISO I used to originally install this with was 875 meg. This CD contained all of Bashrats packs along with about 20 apps and all hotfixes..ect. There was a total space savings of 203 megs. By "cloning" an unattended CD to image in this way a signifigant space savings can be achieved. These images can also be browsed, which makes them a handy archive. (write capabilities sure would be nice.. thats what makes .SDI files so cool)

I also did an image of an unattended windows 2000 workstation build which was installed via the traditional winnt32.exe in the mapped network share method.The size of the image was 230 meg vs 302 for the i386 source folder. A savings of 70 meg and a noticably faster image install versus the winnt32.exe install method.

2) Speed! This app is incredibly fast at restoring images (at least in VM). My preliminary test above pulled the image from the network share where it was stored was performed in under 3 minutes. This same image when called via winnt32.exe takes far longer to load.

3) This would be an easy way for noobs to get into the unattended network install game as it affords a basically 1 click operation to pull down the unattended install image, instead of setting up network shares and getting scripted disk formatting working along with the winnt32.exe stuff.

I use Bart as a platform for unattended installls via winnt32.exe and network shares and the speeds achieved by this imaging program versus the traditional install method could be signifigant. I havent tested this on a real machine yet (testing this from home) but if this program is as fast on a real network as it is in virtual land, it will be a HUGE speed increase in network unattended deployments. The only problem would be the product key which must be changed during server deployments.... I wonder if the product key used in the build could be changed via the programs XML backup functionality??.

Major kudos to the devs in any event

Mailed this also to the Runtime people and got the answer that the gui is not working with large fonts at the moment but they are working on it. I had large fonts (120dpi) enabled instead of the default normal font size (96dpi).
Hope their software departement is as fast as their customer support.

philon

Good to know. Thanks for the update philon.

I've asked them also for command line support. They don't realize what they've started.

Other tools seems very interresting too... Looks promising for data recovery...

They are. I have already purchased them since their pricing was very fair. This is the same group that created the old program tiramisu if anybody remembers that. Well ontrack purchased the writes to tiramisu and after the contract ran out these guys came back with gdb. So far I have been very happy with the results and was able to use it on a drive that had the partition tables whipped out and redone many times by the guy trying to figure out how to get his data back. At any rate I was able to restore about 80gigs of data of the drive. There was more than that but the rescue drive I was copying to was to small to recover it all.

At any rate they have fair prices unlike the other companies out there with similar products. I purchased both gdb for fat and ntfs.

Though I have not read all posts in detail I think that the majority gives a favorable opinion.
I am glad with this, since I installed DriveImage XML myself too a few days ago.
I consider it important that I can now run it in BartPE, though I cannot
access all my internal harddisks.
About this I placed a post somewhere else on this forum and hope that somebody
can give me the solution how to correct this.

Up to now I have been using Norton Ghost 9.0 but for some reason I cannot verify my images anymore, nor is there an image made with the verify option on.
There is an error message EA39070A involved.
I did check and it appears that nevertheless the images made are in order.
Yet I find it somewhat "spooky" so I started looking for other imaging
software and found DriveImage XML.
I am glad, since I am not much of Symantec fan.

This is a great find !

I've tested it out with a couple of small drives, and I like it much better than Drive Image 2002 (the pre-Symantec one) which I've been using so far. (No problems with DI2002, though).

DI XML's interface is nicer and simpler, so it ought to be better for newbies to drive imaging. And it is certainly faster than DI and Acronis. Can't compare speed with Ghost -- won't touch anySymantec product now.

Thanks.

DriveImage XML 14 Min 2.25 Gig comppressed
Ghost 5 Min 949 Megs Compressed

Desided to stay whith Ghost

4.5 gig uncompressed
2.15g - 7.5 min - Ghost
2.85g - 15 min - DI XML

Haven't tried restoring yet, but when I tried compressing live in Windows with 6 gig, it took an hour & compressed it to 4.75 gig.

I was wrong in my earlier post -- DI XML is significantly slower than Drive Image 2002 and Acronis (and, I would guess, Ghost). [I hadn't noticed that the default with XML is w/o compression, and had compared with DI2002 with compresssion).

But the speeds (with XML) you and ptrut have posted seem much slower than what I got.

Drive 6.3 GB (4.2 GB used)

9 minutes with DI XML
5 minutes with DI2002 -- both with compression.

yes and this is the big one though. I know allot of people just steal what they need and use it and allot of people think it's ok or trendy. However dixml is free to use even by a shop without a site license. This means that I can do what I want with it without having to pay $500 or more usd for a site license.

To me that is worth more than anything else. That one thing makes it worthwile to use.

Did they change their licensing info

DriveImage XML V1.00

Price: Free for home users
System Requirements:

Pentium processor

256 MB Ram

Windows XP

It says it's free for home users. I'm building a BartPE disk for use at my job but according to their licensing I can't use it.


BTW anyone used this on SATA drives yet? Does it work?

no they did not change their license. I emailed them about that exact thing. They emailed me back and stated I can use it as much as I want in my shop but there is no support for the product.

I can post the email with headers if you would like. I keep copies of things like that around for proof later.

V1.02 Released



Note the website lists it as V1.00

Thanks stidyup. Any idea what the .02 change is or what the new nu2menu item Windows Disk Management is suppose to do? It's a .msc file and does nothing on my BartPE system.

Hello,

Anyone know where I can still download the driveimage_xml.cab? The link at Bart's PE is broken

Thanks

I just tried all the links in the #1 post including the direct .cab link and they worked for me. What kind of error are you getting? Is your firewall or anti-something blocking access?

The product is only available at the vendor's site so access to it is essential to download the progie.

Hello,

I've tried the URL link http://runtime.swmirror.com/ and click on the driveimage_xml.cab and getting an error message "the document contains no data". My firewall is activated, but I don't think I'm blocking any thing of this type of format. I can download any programs. I can download the dixmlsetup.exe on the same URL link above.

Thanks

hm it seems they have it listed right there on their page pe page
and the link is good. Not sure were you guys found the pother link at but I dont even see it on their pages

http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm

oh and i have downloaded it and when you run it it is the 1.0.2 version

Just try and I can't seem to download file with the cab extension. I don't know why?

I disabled my firewall and try diff. browser IE, Netscape and Firefox. Still can't download any file with cab extension.....hmmmm

Would any member change the extension fo the file and allow me to download
smilie

@surfano63


Since none of us work for the company not a chance.

Rather than dbl clicking on the cab link try RIGHT clicking on it then selecting the Save Target As... option.

I can't do that either. I guess I'm SOL.

Thanks anyway

@surfano63

Well, you could download the standard install file, install it and then make your your own BartPE plugin.

dixml.inf


dixml_nu2menu.xml


And you might want to find out what sw you're running that's preventing you from downloading .cab files. Probably an antivirus type.

hth

@surfano63
There is also an autoHelp plugin for DriveImage XML (No. 94 on the list).
Download and expand this into your folder "plugin":
Get_AutoHelp_Plugs.zip

This is a special, self-contained module for non-reatogo setups just to be used to download and configure autoHelp plugins. All "Reatogo stuff" stays in that folder and does not mix with your setup..

The resulting folder "Get_AutoHelp_Plugs" contains all necessary files needed to auto-download, unzip and autoconfigure the autoHelp plugins. Inside it there is a subfolder "Plugin" with "Get_Plugins.exe". Run it and you will be presented with a list of all 104 autoHelp plugins including DriveImage XML (No. 94).

When you type in the no. and hit enter, it will automatically start the download and unzip it to the right place and open the plugin´s folder.
Then run the autoHelp.cmd of the downloaded plugin to configure it.

Everything will unfold from there (including the download of all needed files for DriveImage XML!).
The plugins can stay right there as PEbuilder will see them in this sub folder construction fine.

As the downloads are done by wget.exe, your problem may not apply here.

Hope this works for you.
Regards, Siegfried

Wow... Excellent utility. Thank you all for responding and appreciate the support.
I was able to dl and added the plugin, but it runs from within Windows, but NOT when I boot from the CD? Any idea why?

Thanks again

You didn't install the plugin properly.

Hey you asked for "any idea".

But without much more information on what you're seeing that's all one can come up with. I did notice that the file name for the plugin's xml file in my posting above was wrong and I updated the posting but PEBuilder would have flagged that as an error when you enabled the plugin so that can't be the problem.

If you´d used it, I guess you´d had a working plugin...

I emailed and support and they said 1.02 fixes the font problem some people were having. They should be updating the website soon to reflect the change.

Thanks CyberSlug.

I emailed them also, about the .msc file, and they said they are working on adding mcc.exe to their plugin.

www.runtime.org seems to be a good group of people.

As for the inoperative .msc menu item change its xml code to:


and it will be properly handled based on the presence of mmc.exe.

found out it was missing a dll file. reinstalled the plugin and everything works great...
Question, when I try to do a backup of my entire C drive and its telling me the drive_c.dat is too large even when I checked compressed mode. It makes sense since the entire C drive would be around couple of GBs. How would one backup the entire C drive and where can it be stored?

Thanks in advance

Hi reatogo,

I also try your reatogoPE. Now I have both CDs......

Thanks for a great utility

If you choose the Split large Files option it will write the backup in 659MB segments. The backups can be stored on another partition, another hd or a remote hd. If they are segmented they can then be copied to CDs. In that my hd backup is large I back up to a removable hd.

Hey, it's up to version 1.10 now. Not sure of all the changes but it now supports scheduling backups.

There are also a few new bugs in the latest version also. Hopefully they release another new version soon. They have been doing a good job of releasing new versions every 1-2 months for the past several months.

What have you found? The worst problem in the prior releases was the backup time if compression was used, imo.