TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software, designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again -- particularly when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table).
Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy!
Clonezilla is a PXE network boot used to clone multiple computers at once - much like norton ghost. Clonezilla Live is a bootable CD/USB image that can replace the need for a network boot server and image host, allowing you to clone a single machine on a local computer without a network.
A walk through of how to install Windows to a virtual hard disk image (VHD) from scratch, instead of a full partition. No VPC was invoked in the making of this post ... just DISKPART a virtual disk into a file, and install.