SelfImage is a utility that allows you to creat images of hard drives or partitions. It's easy enough to use for beginners but features powerful functions normally only found in programs such as Norton Ghost.

This is an excellent solution for anyone trying to create a dual-boot system as you can create an image backup of a Linux partition directly from Windows. You can create an image of an entire hard disk, including the master boot record, partition table, and all partitions as well as restore previously created images to any partition, even mounted ones, as long as it doesn't have open files. The utility is also specially adapted to take advantage of superfast processors such as multi core processors so it performs on-the-fly compression making this a particularly fast way to create images. For network administrators, there's also a useful Network Block Device support to make images of disks on remote machines, and restore them again. And considering all this is free ad released under an open source licence, it's incredibly impressive considering things like Norton Ghost cost an arm and a leg.

A powerful free solution for those that need to make a partition or drive image but are not wealthy enough or confident enough to use consumer packages.