Thank you, EasyBCD!

And I don't mean Binary Coded Decimal.

I recently set up a test machine with a dual-boot XP/Vista configuration. Being the cautious type, I went to make a disk image of the Vista side. That is the side I would be using for testing, and would need to be able to quickly and easily restore it to a clean state (e.g., not have to tediously reinstall Vista each time).

I first tried an old version of DiskImage. Nope, won't run off an NTFS drive and I have no floppy in that machine. Toss the CD and recycle the manual.

Next tried a 2003 version of Norton Ghost. Things seemed to go well for a while, but went south really suddenly. I believe that it choked when it tried to deal with the Vista BCD (Boot Configuation Data) stores. Toss that CD and recycle that manual.

Trying to then reinstall Vista failed repeatedly because the reboots kept trying to reboot a corrupted operating system. I couldn't get to the BCD data from the XP side until some Googling turned up EasyBCD, which saved my sorry butt. Now I'm re-installing Vista.

I think I'll next try Ubuntu with PartImage to back up the disk image. I've paid Symantec enough money over the past few years.