Sorry for not responding quicker, you must be very careful when imaging existing partitions not created with bootitng, I repaired a computer for somebody the other day that had Windows XP Pro, Gentoo, /home and swap partitions probably created through Gentoo. The owner of the computer "apparently" forgot his passwords for Windows, Gentoo, and bios setup, the computer was completely in-accessible. I used bootitng to create an image of Gentoo partition to make room for Installing XP Pro to see if I could activate it with the product key I extracted from Windows XP partition using de-cryption software before deleting the existing Windows XP holding valuable info. I got it activated, then when I tried to re-load Gentoo, it would not work because the image needed a partition which was 2 or 3 megabytes bigger (forget) than original partition. I could not create the larger partition.
Reason for this is that bootitng aligns it's partitions according to C.H.S. values accurately, Windows and/or Linux are not so fussy when creating partitions, (forgot which one, probably both). This is mentioned in the extensive documentation that comes with bootitng. Thorough reading/comprehension of this documentation is essential before use.
Although in my case on this customer's computer was not a bad thing as the customer knew nothing about Linux and just wanted Windows XP, and without the passwords to log into Gentoo, it was useless anyway. His son gave him the computer whom had three years University education in computers. I don't have that kind of background, but guess who gave the customer what he was after?
To make images of existing partitions, they have specific software to do that.
http://www.bootitng.com/
