A morning with Clonezilla

I can't believe software this powerful and effective is free.

It's not the most user friendly software in the world, but once you mess with it and get an understanding of how it works......wow.

I took an older laptop running XP, booted up with the clonezilla(cz) CD and created an image of the HD to a USB connected external HD. The xp box disk usage was at 29.6 gigs, the image cz created was 16.3 gigs (very nice)

I then overwrote the XP box with data using killdisk rendering it useless, wouldn't boot...no OS, no data to speak of, just zeroes from the overwrite.

Booted up with the cz disk, selected to clone the image that I had created on the USB HD to the local drive and the process began. About 30 min later the clone was complete..I rebooted and there it was, the XP box back to it's original state. XP did feel the need to run a CHKDSK on first boot however, no biggie.
Data is there, programs run, no issues that I can see.

From this point on, the last piece of my build doc will include imaging the disk.
I'm impressed. Please bear in mind that I have no experience with any other imaging software so I really don't have anything to compare this to, but damn it....it works.