Are you sure it is a nice blog entry? It looks more like a question to me.

As far as I understand, you created an image on one architecture and used it on another. If so, the direction is as follows:

1. If the original and the restored partitions are of different size (naturally, the restored one may be only larger), figure out if the additional space is available. Do that studying the docs on the file system you use or just try to use that space - no worry, you have a backup anyway. BTW, check the same architecture too since it may blow up later.

2. Try to chroot and reinstall grub. If it fails, forget it.

3. If grub is reinstalled OK, check if the /etc files you copied are still valid for the new system. You know, X may fail to start, network may be down, things like that.

I guess the right direction is to use some kind of unattended install to install your distro on all machines, use tar.bz to transfer personal data, and handle issues like X drivers and network manually (or write a script to automate that).

The most you may hope to get with DD is to prepare a separate image for each architecture and use it for similar systems. In general, DD is to revert to a previous state on the same system, tar.gz is for backups, and /etc is system specific.

Go to questions and ask how to clone a PC. Do not tell what you did with DD! Specify all hardware details, the distro in use, additional packages you installed. Somebody may have created the necessary scripts already.