Yes ,I read the articles well before  I posted my (previous) answer.

First of all, wikipedia is not the be-all or end-all of definitions. It's a collection of contributions by many people who feel that have some knowledge to contribute.
I seems that the various authors have taken the liberty to lump cloning programs together with imaging programs.
They are NOT the same.

A clone is directly "copied" , mostly sector by sector to a bootable hard drive (MBR has been written and different SID has been created) and can be booted from immediately.

An image such as made by imaging programs and stored on a hard drive, are made in a proprietary format
and CANNOT be booted from. Nor is that hard drive bootable.
Only when the image is restored to the original- or a new hard drive ,can you boot up from that drive.

To me that is a clear distinction.
Can't make it any clearer.

Peter E.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Hugh Vandervoort" 
Sent: Wednesday, 14 September, 2011 10:12 PM
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [PCSOFT] Free Clone Program

The definition of cloning seems to include imaging in most cases.

"Disk cloning is the process of copying the contents of one computer
hard disk to another disk or to an "image" file. Often, the contents
of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate
step, and the second disk is loaded with the contents of the image.
This procedure is also useful when moving to a larger capacity disk or
to restore the disk to a previous state."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning

What is disk cloning?

"Disk cloning is the act of copying the contents of a computer's hard
drive. The contents are typically saved as a disk image file and
transferred to a storage medium, which could be another computer's
hard drive or removable media such as a DVD or a USB drive."
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/disk-cloning.html

 

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