I am looking for some imaging solutions for my primarily windows machines (XP, NT, 2000 and 2003). The only thing I have used is Ghost and it has worked great. But there are many restrictions.
- source partition cannot be the same as destination partition
- the destination drive will be overwritten
- the destination drive has to be a CD-RW, Hard disk drive or hard disk partition. Here's my first question - Does external USB hard drives and DVD-RW's work as well ??

This limitation affects me badly at times. A lot of machines have just one drive, and no cd-rw. I want to have all of them imaged though. I am looking at some possible solutions. I read that network backup is possible using ghost. So, can this be done ?
Have one central server with several partitions. From each machine, do a network copy of the machine's image to one of the several partitions.
This is just my thought. If this can be done and is this is the best solution to what I wanted to do, cam someone point me to a detailed guide to achieve my objective.
If this is not the best solution and is there are other solutions, can someone point me to those with detailed guides. In any case I would apprecaite it if anyone could provide links to all the solutions, best and next-best !!

Basically there are many machines to be imaged (I want imaging only mainly because it is quick backup and restore). Most have only one hard disk and no CD-RW.

Thanks a bunch.

Overwriting the destination is not a lrestriction. You WANT Ghost to overwrite the dest when restroring an image. That's the whole principle behind operatiing.

Ghost supports USB drives & DVD burners, among other things, such as Firewire drives. The  entire list of features is posted here:

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/features.html

For imaging across a network, you need the corporate/enterprise version. See here:

http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_network.htm

It's been years since I've seen a computer without a burner. Didn't know they still exist.