HDD Imaging Software

[i sea]

I have been given my grandpas old laptop, which I am to completely wipe and prepare it to be sold. But first, I want to make an image of the hard drive in order to have a copy of all his stuff incase he has forgotten to transfer something to his new laptop. Problem is it has 56 mb of ram and either a 550Mhz or 200 Mhz processor and it runs win me. (dxdiag says 200 but the boot screen says 550, idk...) The other problem is that it can only access fat32 partitions, but the hdd is 4.5GB, with 3GB used space. I have an external hdd id like to dump the image onto(its usb connected and has plenty of fat32 space). What software is old enough or light weight enough to run on this hardware, and is it capable of only imaging the used hard drive space? Ive tried the latest version of Norton ghost, as well as some freeware software, but none of them were able to boot on this laptop(its too slow). I did manage to get an old version of norton ghost to boot, but its too old to access an external hdd. Thanks for any help, and im sorry if this should be posted somewhere else.

 

[4Ryan6]

If you have an external HDD why ghost? Just copy and paste the files you want to keep to the external HDD?

 

[PassMark]

If you are doing this to allow access to the *files*, don't image the machine.

Just Zip up all the files and put the Zip file on the external drive.

If you need to recover a file, getting it out of the Zip file will be easy. If you have a disk image, then it will be in a proprietary format and probalby harder to get a single file back.

 

[i sea]

hmm... I thought about just copying everything, but he has some wierd family tree building software and other strange stuff on it tho. I just want to make sure i can back up everything in case he forgot about something obscure. Plus, I thought it would be cool to make a virtual machine of his laptop as a side project, for no practical reason really. If i just go into the hdd and copy all the files, is there anything extra i have to do since its running win me? i figure i should ask that since me does a lot of other retarted stuff, so i can't really expect it to do anything correctly on its own.

 

[PassMark]

I think you might have problems finding any imaging software that both
1) Works on Windows ME
and
2) Then allows the image to be mounted as a virtual machine

Either 1) or 2) should be OK. But 1) and 2) will be harder.