Clonezilla and Windows XP cloning

This was a long and tiring day.I learned a lot about clonezilla and windows xp. I first tried to clone partitions and whole disks in different ways. In clonezilla terms these are device to image file or device to device. I couldnt much succeded in device to device option. May be due to lack of reading howto and wiki. Clonezilla first asks the device or place where  the image is going to be stored or read from. That comes to me weird at the beginning to me but later I got used to it. I cloned partitions or disks to images which are located in usb disks,local disks or even on an ssh server.This was fun. Then when it comes to restore the problems begin :) .OK. Yes there are some problems which are behind the doors and waiting you after or while restoring images. Firstly Clonezilla cant restore to a smaller hard drive or partition. To make it restore to a smaller drive in FAQ it is stated that one must use gparted or else to shrink the original partition before making the image. So this is one thing. If you wish to restore to a smaller disk first you must make the original drive smaller. Secondly Clonezilla is very strict about partition names. Namely if you wish to restore an image taken from partition say /dev/sda5 to a partition /dev/sda6 you must make some modifications on the image files. I have done manual modifications by sed and I think I was close the solution. My case was very different. I had a weird install of Windows XP. It was installed to second partition on the disk. And while changing the names I guess there happened a mistake. Because it is installed on the second partition boot loader was written to first partition and so was boot.ini file. I got some "ntldr is missing" and "boot.ini file is missing" or like that errors which I overcame with using recovery console of Windows XP install cd.It was another informative story for me. I learned to use copying bootloader files and rebuilding boot.ini file as stated in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/12/ntldr-is-missing-press-any-key-to-restart/ .I wanted to restore an image which was for /dev/sda5 to a partition on /dev/sdb1. I was almost succesful. Almost because now XP doesnt boot ie. boot hangs displaying blue windows logo.

Today also I learned much about IDE drives and bios options. I used 2 old ide drives and a cdrom for these hacks. It was another informative story.

Clonezilla seems to be a good solution for cloning but be very aware of how to restore your images.

BTW I heard another cloning solution for Windows which is named FOG. It has some numerous other features than clonezilla. This would be another days' story.