I want to use acronis to image my OS drive as backup,, also I want to use a partition utility to repartition my old drive now that I moved my data to the new.... but sata drives don't show up until you're in Windows. Is there a known way to access them with dos based apps like imaging software? or am I SOL? If yes then I'll have to either keep it how it is, or reinstall windows and repartition it during the install, which I really don't want to do since I got everything mostly setup now.

You can use DriveImageXML to create an image of the drive. Kill the drive, repartition it, then reload the image with DriveImage. The only stipulation with that, is the partition that you imaged, can't go on a partition that's smaller than what it's currently on...at least to my knowledge.

although this post is a couple 3 years old, I'm going to bump it up in attempts to shed some light on the partition sizing and editing of the finished image, prior to restoring onto a "different" disk size or partition size.. The DIXML application can make an exact image of the system partition, including all the free space.. This is called "raw mode" and is user selectable.. You can uncheck raw mode and make a small image of only the data files.. There are also tools that can manipulate the drive image once it is created..... To reduce the size of the partition, or extract only data and boot up information to be copied onto another partition etc.....

I am hoping the manipulation tools will allow installing data from an imaged drive on to a different file system without repartitioning, or changing the partition alignment..

I recently used this free tool and "wow it's fast" it imaged my whole drive in 3.8 minutes.

Here's a quote from Lifehacker in their discription of DIXML features Raw mode. In "raw mode," DriveImage XML makes a sector by sector copy of your drive, including unused space. This means your image file will be the same exact size of the drive, and it can only be restored to a drive of that same exact size. For most home use situations, leave this box unchecked. (There's no sense in backing up blank disk space.)