I'm looking for free, preferably Open Source software that will allow one to create an image of a hard drive that can be restored later without the use of a pre-installed OS. I know of tools like CloneZilla, PartImage et cetera, however none of those provide me my key: Spanning of DVDs or CDs, instead of an external hard drive/NAS as a backup median.

For comparison, the software used before was PC Angel.

Just because I know the above is probably jumbled and confusing, here's a list of what I need, if any of you know of this kind of software:

Hard Disk Imaging Software:
1. Free, OSS is a plus.
2. Create Recovery-type media.
3. No pre-installed OS required for recovery of drive.
4. Ability to burn to discs, span CDs/DVDs.


Or even if we could find a way to do this from a livecd that would work on a single-optical drive system.

take a look at
http://www.mondorescue.org/

That looks fantastic, I don't know how I haven't seen that before.

I'm going to test it out now. Repo, you're a champ, thank you.

I hate to be a bother here -- do you or anyone else know of a livecd that includes Mondo? I realize I can install it after boot, but if there was a distribution that came with it, I'd be very excited. I'm googling, but not quite able to find.

Perhaps harder to use, the dd command is almost always included in any Linux distribution. It can be used to image and restore a disk, although restoring to a disk with a different geometry may require repairing the new partition table since the table from the old drive will not contain the correct values. ("Repairing" is, in most cases, not destructive.)

You could install a distribution on usb, and then install Mondo

That's what I'm looking to do. I may just end up creating my own; I need something deployable. Hence dd not working too well for me. Thanks a bunch though, to the both of you.