LiveCD to ghost hdd to ext. hdd?

I've ordered an HP nc8430 from Laptops Direct and hope to take delivery sometime this week although have learnt from reading a few reviews that these laptops come with a 6GB recovery partition rather than a few recovery cds.

This isn't a major problem because I'm pretty good with computers in general and am comfortable loading an OS, drivers and applications manually but I don't think the laptop comes with a Windows XP Professional cd creating a slight issue. Also I'm used to having hundreds of gigs of storage rather than just the ~65gb which I'll probably have available on the laptop so would really like to free up the used 6gb partition. However, I'd like a way to recover the laptops harddrive to stock incase I need to reload in this manner and also I'd feel more comfortable having such a backup.

What I would like to know is if there is a way to use BartPE or a Linux Live CD and a third party utility to copy an image of the laptops harddrive to an external harddrive which I have using a USB connection? This would need to be a copy of the complete drive image rather than just the contents. I've read that Norton Ghost should be able to do this although I'd prefer a free solution if at all possible.

Thanks for any help you can give me,
Andrew

 

Try this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=75798

 

I'm not sure about a free solution, but Norton Ghost should indeed be able to do it (I've done it before). Same goes for Paragon DriveBackup.

 

Look at my post here. It'll tell you how to do a Linux drive image like you're saying. I wrote it in regards to using an Ubuntu LiveCD, but most LiveCD's should work similarly.

 

Thanks for the replies, the slightly ironic thing is my post is actually older than the linked post . I've managed to borrow a bootable CD-ROM of Ghost 2003 which doesn't detect my USB2 HDD (something to do with my BIOS being in 1.1/2.0 mode) although I have worked out how to record DVDs using it, hopefully it will work with the laptops DVD-RW when it arrives, if not I'll have to format my USB2 HDD to FAT32 and try your Ubuntu method.