Also called a
disk clone, an exact copy of a computer’s
hard drive. The copy includes all the
partition information,
boot sectors, the
file allocation table,
operating system installation and
application software. Disk images are used to transfer a hard drive’s contents during a
hardware upgrade, to restore a hard drive’s contents during disaster recovery or when a hard drive is erased, and to transfer the contents of a hard drive from one computer to another.
The process of creating a disk image is called disk imagine or disk cloning. Typically, special disk imaging software is required to copy the hard drive data.
