[heero_yuy]

Beware that even if you make what appears to be an exact image the system may not properly boot from this disk if it is placed in C as the only HDD. The boot fails at the point of trying to load the Windows login screen or the desktop GUI.

This is because the PC allocates drives letter by letter at boot time but the OS as the final part of its load changes to HD0, HD1 etc and these are not necessarilly the same as C,D etc as they are stored on the drive itself.

The image was made on what the OS considers to be HD1 but the boot sequence expects HD0.

This information is stored in the partition \ boot data of the disk, not the filing system

This can be fixed but you need to use fdisk /mbr (Undocumented switch) This destroys the OS version of HD0 etc and forces the OS to reallocate the drives. I can't remember whether I used it from the recovery console or a 98 boot disk.

This is for XP but I think it's the same for the later versions. I know this because I increased the HDD size on an XP SP2 system without a reinstall by copying all the files across and then swapped D into C. ( NTLDR has to be the first file copied, similar to the old io.sys)

Software that operates outside the windows environment may be able to overcome this limit.