Partition - backup image size

[cheapthirllz]

The short version of my problem - I had Leopard installed on a 15 Gb partition and was able to make and restore backup images of the OS X partition in BootIt NG. The resulting image files were an appropriate and manageable size, ie. the approx 7 Gb of used disk space made an image file of about 3.5 Gb. I needed a bigger Mac partition so I opted to reinstall onto a 50 Gb partition. Now my backup image files made with BootIt are over 35 Gb! even though the used disk space is still less than 7 Gb. What's gone wrong?

 

The long version - Ok my problem started when I wanted to edit a 10 Gb video file in Leopard but I didn't have sufficient room in the home partition so I tried creating a new data partition formatted to Mac OS Extended Journaled. First I made room and created the partition as a Fat 32 with BootIt then formatted the new partition by erasing it in Disutility which formats it. This process trashed my partition table so that none of my 3 data partitions were visible in either OS X or Windows. Even when I deleted the new Mac partition I couldn't restore the earlier state. The best I can describe the situation is that there seemed to be a phantom primary partition within the extended partition which made more primaries than allowable. My first question is, how did the Disk Utility create a primary partition? There was no such option that I could see.

 

Anyway for a time I was stuck, I tried a host of various partition tools to delete and create & check partitions so they would be visible again in OS X & Windows but I kept getting a variety of partition errors messages along the lines off "possible overlapping partitions" "too many primary partitions". Happily I was still able to see and backup the lost data partitions to another HDD with BootIt and then I tried to format the disk and start again. Even this didn't go smoothly. I used Fdisk, and other partition managers to try to create a workable partition setup I could build on. I spent half a day on it! For a while I thought my HDD had developed a permanent corruption. I finally had some success by first installing BootIt to the end of the HDD rather than at the beginning where I normally would have but which for some reason I wasn't able to do. I then created a primary 50 Gb partition for OS X at the beginning of the drive followed by another 50 Gb primary for WinXP and an extended partition into which I copied back by data partition backups. I adjusted the partition sizes to take up unallocated space and installed OS X & WinXP. the installs went smoothly, partitions are visible and everything is working as expected except, the OS X partition backups made with BootIt are way too big. Later I will try out Time machine backups onto a external drive but I would really like to understand what went wrong.

 

Anyone got a clue for me?