I've just been playing around with partimage an ghost (drive imaging) like software. A few notes on it. If your getting "banner mismatch" errors make sure your client and server version matches. Also, make sure your partimaged server is started from a directory that the partimage user has write access to. If your having problems with logins you can turn supposedly them off with the "-L" (if the server was compiled with that option) and background the process with "-D". I don't think that -L flag in partimage works to disable logins. My suggestion is to precompile your own binaries and turn off ssl and logins. Then copy the binaries over the network to the rescue boot disk. Unless you can put a user in the /etc/partimage/partimageusers file. That user has to have an account on the system. You could also try to get the precompiled binaries from the partimage site. It has all logins and ssl turned off. Both client and ssl to support no logins (check with -i) or you will keep getting the login box popping up even when the server says its turned off.
When restoring a partition you have to actually create the partition again on the disk (fdisk) before the restore with the same or larger partition size. You might want to do an "fdisk -l /dev/hda" (/dev/hda if you have a PATA drive /dev/sda if you have a SCSI or SATA drive) before you do your backup and save this informtion. Then on the new disk you can try to match the number of blocks of the old disks partition.
Then remember to flip on the boot flag for the bootable partition. Also, put in the correct filesystem id.
Partimage does not put the boot loader (grub or lilo) back on for you. This is up to you.
