Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

My son is away at college and just got a new MAC through the school so he sent home his old HP laptop running Vista for me to backup his drive and send him the discs. My question is, will he be able to access his files on the images or would he have to do a full restore to a hard drive to get to anything? Thanks for any help provided.

additional info...
My options are to backup to DVD-R discs directly or to my own external HDD I use for my backups. The HDD has plenty of space but because I run XP I cannot create a new partition on it or do a disk to disk copy because I would lose all of my own data.

Yes, he will be able to access files on those images. R-Drive Image can connect them as virtual logical disks. There's an important restriction though: the connected disks are read-only, that is, he'll be able to read files from them and copy them to some other place, but not change them, delete, etc.
I recommend you to backup the disk to an external HDD, because he'll have to copy all image parts stored on CD/DVD to one place to be able to connect the image as a virtual logical disk.

Yes! thank you so much! That is exactly what I needed to know! OK well, since the only external HDD I have that would fit his 200Gb is mine and in use, I will have to go with the disks. But he has his own external HDD with him. So he could then copy the individual image files from the disks to his external HDD, all in one folder, and then read them, correct? How would he read them? Does he need this program as well? Is there a way to include a viewer with the discs or should he just download it himself there? He is on a MACBookPro. Thanks so much for the fast and helpful responses!

R-Drive Image is a Windows program. It cannot be run on a Mac OS.
R-Drive Image is necessary to connect images as virtual logical disks.
So, I'm not sure your sone can use R-Drive Image.

LOL you couldn't lead with that? I said in the first post he was on a MAC. Any suggestions then?

He may be on MAC, but can use a someone else's Windows machine, can't he?

No one has one unfortunately, he checked with everyone he knows in the dorm, which as a freshman is not many people. He goes to Berklee. They are all required to use a MAC given to them through the school. There is really NO way to read the image through a MAC? I thought most MACs these days could run windows programs, no? Any and all suggestions appreciated! Thanks!

Unfortunately, Mac cannot run Windows programs, at least at the level R-Drive Image works. I don't know what to recommend you. Maybe, R-Drive Image is not a program you need.