Ormis's questions

We had an old CNC machine's hard-drive fail recently. The hard-drive is an old 1275MB IDE (Seagate) and there were defiantly bad sectors on it. I was able to image the contents of the drive onto a drive in my computer before it became completely unusable (I used DD, replacing all bad sectors w/ 0s). After running a couple chdsks, the SATA drive will boot off of the image. This is great, but there's one problem. The CNC machine old and requires IDE, I've attempted to copy the currently booting image off of the SATA drive and onto IDE drives numerous times in numerous ways and every time I do so the machines return that a boot device cannot be found.

Some other information:

The file system is fat32, running windows 98  
The SATA drive is an 80gb drive
I have tried copying the image to three 20gb and two 80gb IDE drives  
I have checked the jumper on the back of the IDE drives when using them

If anyone has any ideas, questions, suggestions, etc. please let me know.

P.S. I would just put a fresh install of win98 on the machine if i had the installation media (so that's out of the question). And if it comes to it, this is my last week working here, so I'll leave that to my co-worker.

EDIT: Also, I have tried using Clonezilla as well as straight up DD to copy the image to the IDE drives.

I am attempting to create my own one-off imaging utility based on fedora and I have one main question. The utility (well, in theory) will save a raw image of the machine to a network storage location. For me the best target is a samba share.

The question is: what type of image container would be easiest to use? Could it be as simple as DDing the drive contents into a file on the samba location? And if so, would writing from that file be as simple as DDing the file on the samba target to the new machine's hard drive?

This is my first attempt at a project like this and I don't want to get snagged by something simple going wrong.

Just for now, all I want the live disk to do is load, mount the share, and give two options... copy a raw image from the local disk to a image on the share or load an image from the share to the local disk.

If there's already a tool to do this basic task, keeping it simple, please let me know. I've looked at all the big name cloaning utilities and I need this for one-off imaging (i'm currently using FOG which is great for an entire lab, but not as nice for one-time images).