Difference between Cloning and Imaging...!!!

Hello,
i just want to know what is the difference between Cloning and Imaging, i Googled and found few information about Cloning and that is making an exact copy of your HDD partition and a user can import that cloned file to another larger or smaller HDD but to the same hardware.
Imaging is little blurry to me, as their are terms such as sector to sector imaging and sometimes people refer their Cloned HDD as image and sometimes thier are feature in many Backup programs like Copy your HDD does that mean Cloning, as in Acronis their is clearly a feature to do a sector to sector imaging hence i am presuming the copy button in the program window meant Cloning. Their are terms like Snapshot used to like in Drive Snapshot, not the ISR version snapshot.

Any ways their are term such as cold imaging and hot imaging , what would that mean to, Googling showed ten results and that made a whole lot puzzling, hence i want to know from this forum: who uses these programs and often use these terms in their system backup process.

Could someone clear this doubt.

 

pinso, this should help.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.shtml#note14

 

Check this out, too.

 

That was really helpful, thanks for that.

 

You are welcome!