How to properly restore a Vista/7 system partition imaged under Linux

It is, in fact, possible to image and restore a Windows Vista or 7 partition using Linux software only - ntfsclone, clonezilla, and possibly partimage, though I'm less certain about the latter (it may not support later NTFS versions). However, these versions of Windows are very fussy for some reason about the leading space before the first partition. They need ~1.05 MB of blank space before the partition begins.

The standard cfdisk tool does not provide this. Fortunately, the parted partition editor does, as does its GUI gparted. So use one of these to partition your drive before restoring with CloneZilla or whatever - otherwise Windows will fail to boot with the dreaded "disk read error" message.

(This message brought to you by hours of wasted spare time.)

P.S. Personally I recommend using gparted, because the CLI version creates and deletes partitions in real time and is therefore a wonderful way to lose data.

 

Hi, been lurking around reading and learning so thought id finally chime in since im a big fan of clonezilla. I use clonezilla almost every month after m$ releases new updates for my win7 laptop ill revert back to the freshly installed image of 7 then create a new image with clonezilla after its finished. I have only had 1 problem in the past with clonezilla about 2 years ago when it had a tenancy to corrupt x64bit vista images but that has been ironed out. i use clonezilla thru partedmagic since it comes with gparted clonezilla and other imaging software included. when you fireup cz choose device-image- local_dev(if you use external hds like i do) - then itll give u a list of options http://clonezilla.org/screenshots.php?in_path=/00_Clonezilla screen shots from site so you can follow along. if you want to save windows choose savedisk/parts to restore choose restoredisk/parts. choosing to savedisk will make an image of the entire drive including the mbr. choosing to restore disk will restore this image just as the day you made it. choosing saveparts will save partitions on the hard drive like the 100mb sys part. and your windows partition. if you choose both it will save the mbr as well. if you choose restoreparts you can pick which partitions to restore. for example say your windows partition becomes corrupted you can restore the windows partition and not the 100mb partition and boot back into windows again. cz must have the same amount of space to restore the image from when it was made.
ps sorry for grammatical errors my english is not the best but i try

 

Update: no, you cannot use partimage for this. You have to use ntfsclone or such. partimage will corrupt your filesystem.