Drive imaging using Norton Ghost or Clonezilla

Many of us might have experienced how hard things can get if the Operating System is infected with virus programs. The virus problem gets worse if the system does not have a good antivirus solution installed. Free antivirus programs provide basic protection from virus. That means they won't detect the latest threats and sometimes may not be able to remove the infected files. Virus, malware, spyware and many other unwanted programs can creep into system anytime without you being aware of it.

Also improper un-installation of software can cause improper working of the OS. Although there are registry repairing software available sometimes a clean format remains the only solution. But OS re-installation can be avoided by using drive imaging software to backup the contents of the drive and restore them when needed.

Norton Ghost

Norton Ghost is propitiatory software which can create drive images and store them as .gho file on the hard disk. It create images to single partitions or of the whole hard disk. It also can compress the disk image file (.gho) if required. Image restoration takes much less time than re-installing the OS.
For example : A 20 GB C: drive which is half filled can be backed up into a (.gho) file of 5-8GB size and takes about 10 minutes to restore back. 

Clonezilla

Open source alternative to drive imaging software solutions. It does not require any license and is also available as bootable Live CD download. It also works similar to Ghost and can create drive images of Linux file systems (ext3 or ext4 filesystems) as well as Windows File Systems (fat32 or ntfs). Restore time is also similar to Ghost and depends on the processor and disk performance.