On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 05:17:31PM -0500, Phil Howard wrote:

> And you could still do a "bare metal" recovery as long as the partitions
> on disk were compatible (which is why, if I write such a driver in Linux
> I would use the MSDOS partition table format).

Some OS screw up when the partition table is modified.  This is why fdisk
gives a warning.  Beeing paranoid, I always reboot after I modify the
partition table.

I don't think it is really worth the effort to implement such a
functionality.  I bet in most installations compression/encryption/network
is the real bottlenek.