Alrighty... Amused by the 'ghetto ghost' routine and using Tom's with netcat, I've decided to try it myself. Here at work we have 9 machines in our training lab running Bill's OS. Since every class involves different software, software gets installed, uninstalled, re-installed, work files get created, deleted, lost, etc and over the course of a month of training our machines are screaming for help. So, we want a solution for creating images of the drives so we can restore them in a matter of minutes. Since all the commercial software packages (Ghost being the biggy) require licensing, it doesn't make sense to purchase per-seat licenses for this small application. So, I opened my big mouth and "linux" came out. I'm thinking of putting together a server out of parts in the basement and adding a decent sized hard drive. I'd do something like install Bill's OS on a machine, then boot with Tom's and netcat the hard drive over to a file on the linux server. Then I want to burn that image to a bootable CD so our not-so-linux lovers can easily do it when I'm not around. My predicament is this: I've never used netcat. I've used DD for something like this, which grabs not only the data, but every sector on the drive so if I have a 4 GB drive with 500 MB used, I get a 4 GB file. Does netcat do the same thing? If it does, it's a problem. 4 GBs won't fit on any CDR. Any iodeas how I could do this nicely? _Brian