I have an interesting scenario. I'm dual booting Leopard OS X and Windows XP. One hard drive has Windows XP, one hard drive has Leopard. I have an NTFS external hard drive with all of my data on it. I have an 8GB flash drive. I'm trying to make a backup of my OS X installation, an image that I can restore from. I've tried a couple of different ways but can't figure out the easiest way. The first way would be to boot to my OS X dvd, format my flash drive as a Mac partition, backup an OS X image to the flash drive, but then I would have to boot into leopard in order to save that image to my NTFS drive (NTFS 3g lets me read and write to NTFS in leopard) because XP wouldn't be able to read that flash drive. I also have to reformat my flash drive whenever I want to use it in XP. OS X can read my flash drive in FAT32 format but FAT32 has a 4gb file limitation and my image will be over 4GB. Is there some file format that both XP and Leopard can read without a 4GB file format

Also potentially my flash drive isn't big enough to hold this image unless it's compressed and unless disk utility compresses while it's making this image this isn't going to work

torrent, or .rar

Ok so I successfully backed up my image to my flash drive. It was compressed so it was under 8GB so it fit. I also had to format my flash drive to Leopard format. Then I tried to restore the image from the flash drive to another external drive to see if it would be bootable. The restore completed successfully but I couldn't boot the HD. Is there something else I have to do before it will boot? Maybe verify permissions or something?