Why would you want to clone the unused space?
The compression is completely lossless.
Good luck with the builtin MS solution, it doesn't work for me.
A common limitation of all clone programs it that the partition you clone to must be the same size, down the last bit or larger
as the partition you create the clone image from.
Even the MS solution.
This does not constitute a less robust program.
On the contrary Clonezilla is very robust and easy to use.
Am I understanding your original question to be that you want to create another instance(s) of your Win 7 install on other partitions of your hard drive as backups?
If so that is totally unnecessary.
An image created by clonezillacan be stored on a separate storage partition
or external drive for safe keeping.
In the event of disaster the image can be restored from that location in minutes
bringing you back to the point the image was created.
Carefully read the guide I created and also the documentation on the Clonezilla web site
to see how this is done.
I backup my WIN 7 install frequently with Clonezilla and it only takes minutes and doesn't
waste disk space as mentioned in my guide
As to cloning the empty space it creates an unnecessarily large image.
For example if you clone a 70 GB partition including free space the resulting image will be 70 GB.
If for example you only use 20 GB of that 70 GB then a tool like clonezilla will only create an image from 20 GB of used space
producing a final image of 20 GB.
The compression is optional (user defined) but using the default compression level in clonezilla would further reduce the image size to ~10 GB.
Again the compression is
lossless.
Of course you would save this image to another partition or an external HDD or thumb drive to be used to restore a borked system.
An of course you can not create and save an image to the same partition it's created from.
BTW, there are great free Partition managers available that can perform partitioning chores such as shrink or move partitions.
Two of note are both Live CD's and are GUI based.
The first is Parted Magic, a complete Live Linux distro that has Gparted as it's Partition manager.
News The other is a standalone Live version of Gparted.
GParted -- About Both tools support NTFS, Fat32, ReiserFS and all the linux filesystems and work great.
Both tools run in Live mode, that is you boot to them and won't mess with your hard drive unless you
instruct them to ie: making changes to a partition\drive.
BTW, you shouldn't need to mess with the 100 MB partition.
Here's the scenario you run Clonezilla and tell it to make an image of your C: partition and instruct it to save the image to another
HDD (external), partition or USB flash device.
Of course the storage device needs to be large enough to hold the image.
It sits there until disaster strikes.
Run Clonezilla again and instruct it to restore using the image previously created.
When done you are back in business.
In minutes.