I purchased a Drobo 4-bay array, the network companion device, and 4 1TB drives. This gives me 2.71TB effective storage with the redundancy of RAID 5. Now that I can start consolidating data, I'm free to rebuild this machine (Windows XP), my test machine (Ubuntu 8.10), and one of my laptops (Ubuntu 8.10). I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 and built a clean Ubuntu box to aid in disk imaging.

In an attempt to try a few alternate methods of imaging, decided to try the following:

Symantec Ghost 2003 (this version doesn't have native USB support) -- There are guides that show how to create a boot disk with USB support, but I was looking for a simple, native utility to clone drives.

Symantec Ghost 11.5 (apparently this one doesn't support USB either)

PartImage (this was on a bootable system rescue cd I found and downloaded), systemrescuecd-x86-1.1.7.iso

The PartImage menu-driven interface was not intuitive, nor forgiving. I selected bzip2 compression and had to start over upon finding that it doesn't support restoring the master boot record (MBR) with this option selected. I had to restart PartImage several times before determining that none of the options I selected were going to work as expected, so I moved on to Clonezilla.

Clonezilla looked promising and actually generated a backup copy of the drive on the first try, and without any problems. I restored the image to another drive and attempted to boot Windows XP. Failure. The XP splash screen flashed for a second and the machine rebooted.

My original backup strategy using dd produced the same results.

I also made a backup image using nftsclone, since this drive is formatted NTFS. This utility only took a few minutes to build the image, but I haven't tested the restore process yet.

I Googled for a while and looked at modifying my boot.ini, and attempted to use the Windows Recovery Console, but Windows could not see my SATA interface. I found a few others online who experienced similar issues and read recommendations to copy drivers to a floppy disk, and decided not to bother with that. I moved on see if I could get the Grub boot loader to boot Windows XP. There are several guides online that show how to do this, but a few minutes into troubleshooting and after successfully reproducing my previous splash screen and reboot results I opened another computer with only a SATA interface, plugged in the SATA drive, and booted Windows XP without any problems.