So far I’ve talked about using various programs on drive images, but haven’t pointed out a tool for creating them.

Drive images are a copy of an entire drive, generally taken when it’s offline. Generally these are used for backups, forensic analysis, or in an attempt to save a drive with bare metal recovery methods.

A range of utilities are available, all with varying ease of use and functionality. One of these is G4L or Ghost for Linux.

G4L allows you to back up partitions or whole drives to a range of media or over a network. It’s Linux based and GPL licensed (although that has been a point of contention, hopefully they’ve worked it out) so it should be somewhat familiar to Linux users.

Check out their Freshmeat page, grab a copy, and burn it to ISO. Since the interface is a bit wonky I’d recommend using it on a few data sets you don’t care about, just to acclimate yourself.