Im looking for a tool or program that someone can recommend to me to image my hard drive for worst case scenarios onto a cd and is able to restore it to hdd disk after a format. you know right? just being prepared for the worst of what could happen.

Norton Ghost ?

paragon drive backup / exact image, ghost is better though
what was the program you wrote about before you edited this post
because i could use that

Again, for the umpteen thousandth time, Norton Ghost 2003.

It can be run from within windows, or it can be run from a boot floppy or CD.
(my personal favorite method)

It can read FAT-32 or NTFS hard drives with equal ease and burn a compressed Image file to a second HD partition, a Second HD or directly to a CD or DVD. It will span multiple disks when required.

When you boot up with a Ghost boot floppy and select to burn the image file to a DVD (for instance) the program will ask you if you want to copy the boot floppy to the DVD as a boot sector for the DVD.

That gives you a bootable restore DVD or CD that rivals anything put out by any of the big named boxes.

You can buy it from many sources on the internet for less than $7 usd.

Some more info about your system and OS would be helpfull here.

Good Luck,
Andromeda43

Acronis kicks the crap out of ghost

That sounds like an "opinion" from someone who's either never used Ghost or was too inept to use it to its fullest potential.

Opinions, like the one quoted above, do nothing here but inflame. If you have any hard facts, please list them.

That's what the original poster was asking for....not blind and inflamatory opinions.

Cheers,
Andromeda

For FAT32 file systems, a free and easy imaging tool is SavePart

http://www.partition-saving.com/

I've used this a lot and never had any problems.