Fedora :: Imaging A Partition Containing A XP System?

I want to make an image of a partition containing a Windows XP system.

I know that Norton Ghost can do it, and I think Clonezilla, and many other programs also.

But I was wondering whether a simple dd would work.

The basics would be something like this:

Boot the computer from a CD or USB containing a live Linux. Then:

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/someExternalDisk/xp.img

where hda1 is an NTFS filesystem containing an XP system.

To restore,

dd if=/someExternalDisk/xp.img of=/dev/hda1

Obviously it needs a few other things to make it nice, like:
bs=2M,

pipe to gzip
zeroing the empty space before compressing,

But would the basic scheme work? I don't think dd cares what's in the partition, so it should work.