Hello

I'm still having issues when restoring Windows partitions using CloneZilla (XP enters an endless loop with "Autochk - File not found", and Vista doesn't boot ("Err 17 - File not found"; It looks like this is an error reported by Grub, though).

For those of you used to cloning partitions so you can easily restore an OS to perform tests... are there tricks that must be done to save/restore/boot partitions using CloneZilla?

For instance, CloneZilla provides four options that deal with MBR (-g, -t, -j1, -j2). Grub can also perform some kung-fu (such as geometry(), parttype(), etc.). And with XP/Vista/7 being particular with making any change to the configuration due to activation, I wouldn't be surprised if something had to be done prior/after cloning Windows partitions.

Ideally, I'd like to just boot with a CD, restore the image, remove the CD, and expect the OS to start without having to mingle with Grub every time.

Thank you for any help.

While imaging partitions with Clonezilla (or any other application) works well when the image is restored to the partition it was imaged from, problems arise when restoring the image to a different partition. The reason is that two files contain configuration data necessary for booting:
1) if the OS is GNU/Linux, those files are /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst (grub.conf on some distros).
2) if the OS is windows, only one file is necessary: /boot/grub/menu.lst

The reasons:
In Linux, the grub uses the config file to find the bootable kernel image and initrd. Fstab tells the system which devices to mount, and their mount points. If you clone partitions with one set of device numbers, and restore the cloned image to different partitions, things get messed up until you edit fstab to correct the device/mount point errors. Grub's menu.lst also has to be edited to corrected the menu entries to show the location of the vmlinuz kernel image, and the location of the root of the filesystem.

For windows, menu.lst has to be edited to show the location of the windows partition if it has changed from the original partition.

So, to help you, we need to see:
1) the output of 'fdisk -l'
2) the devices and mount points of /etc/fstab.
3) the menu list from /boot/grub/menu.lst

That "Err 17 - file not found" is commonly encountered when the menu.lst points to one partition as the location of the bootable kernel image, and it isn't there.

Thanks for the help, but I was restoring the image into its original location (/sda1).

Turns out Grub seems unable to tell that a partition is NTFS-formatted, and requires this line in menu.lst for XP/Vista to boot:

Hope this helps,