I use ghost and partition magic all the time. When I set up a new machine configuration, I get it all running, Use Pmagic to reduce the partition size to a few hundred megs bigger than needed, ghost an image to a file, and stick it on my storage server. Since the vast majority of installs are <2G, I can fit quite a few in my raid. When I have another with the same setup, I ghost the image to the new drive, pop it in the new computer, change machine name, IP, etc, use partition magic to re-expand the partition to whatever the specs are, and I'm done. 20-30 minutes on average.