So a little while ago I asked a few questions regarding cloning of a disk whilst it was active;
http://reboot.pro/topic/18763-capture-local-disk/
Some of these solutions were fine, but none were ideal (mostly either cost or image size).
A little more googling into VSS and I found this page;
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adioltean/archive/2006/09/18/761515.aspx#comments
In essence what you do is instigate a NTBACKUP on your Windows XP box which in turns creates the shadow copy of your logical disk. Then you can use the Dosdev.exe to assign this a drive letter in the command prompt. When this is done you can use imagex to capture the shadow drive.
So far I have been able to create a image and in the process of applying this back to a new disk drive to replicate a bare metal restore.
Has anyone done this process before? Apart from the issues that can happen when writing to the disk whilst doing all this are there any other concerns i should be aware of?
I will let you know if i am able to use the wim i create as a full backup or not.