Hello,

Can someone please help....

Slightly mad question here: Is there a way of getting drive image to
*not* compress a file of a given name so that this file can be zeroed
and the deleted prior to imaging the drive?

Background:-

If I wanted to use ghost or drive image to take a backup of a  250MB
drive with 50MB free space and no drivespace installed, I would create
a 50mb file full of zeros, and delete it before creating the image in
order to help with compression and therefore reduce the size of the
final image.

Now if the 250MB drive had drivespace installed and showed 540MB total
space and 302MB free, its not absolutely obvious what to do with regard
to the free space without knowing a lot more about drivespace.

For instance writing a file with 302MB worth of zeros would not fill up
the free space as the file would be compressed to almost nothing.

Writing random data to the empty area doesnt help because as soon as I
tried to overwrite it with zeros, then the new file would be tiny and
the rest would still be random -  the opposite of what I want.

This brings me to my original question: Is there a way of getting drive
image to *not* compress a file of a given name so that this file can be
zeroed and the deleted prior to imaging the drive?

Any other constructive suggestions are welcome.

Hal.
thanks in advance.