You see my problem is that I need to make backups of windows PC's and then replace windows with Linux. Then from Linux I want to restore my backups of the network or whatever storage I'll be using.

Currently I'm using NTFS-Clone which works fine because I can mount my image as a loop-back device and extract specific files. NOW the down-side of it... The IMG file that NTFS-Clone create is the size of the actual partition backed up.

I hope this help & hope you can help me

J22



PS. Its ziped at creation, so the img file size is the size of data on the disk which is great but at resore time I need to unzip it and then the img size will be as big as the actual partition size...OUCH

Simply said,

There will be a need to compromise, this way or that way, can one have his cake and eat it too?

I'm not sure if this will help, but basically, this only creates primary partitions, max 255 (I think). You are allowed to have an operating system see four partitions per hard drive including itself (sort of an MBR limitation), it is possible to have a Linux system see it's partition, Swap, /home , and the fourth could be another system on the same HDD. Not sure how that works with NTFS systems, probably alright.
You can create compressed images with bootitng and store it in any number of ways for restoring corrupt or compromised systems or transfering, or for installing same OS on a number of computers with same hardware, but I don't think you can extract from a compressed image, but as mentioned, you can have another partition (possibly even on a network, read documentation) with an un-compressed working setup that you can grab from, that partition can be on any of 8 drives supported by bootitng.
Something like that. The way I read it and the options I see in configuration, one operating system can see 31 other (inactive) partitions.

Forgot to mention,

I have at times up to three copies of Fedora 6 on my HDD when working on it, all derived from the same image, all using same /home and swap and same user, all bootable and fully usable. Same for Windows XP.