Glad you mentioned this, because I love bragging about my easy method.
I use bootitng as my boot manager, it comes with all the partitioning tools you need, including imaging partitions without un-allocated data (deleted or removed stuff). When using bootitng for the multi-boot manager features, one must install it to the hard drive and maybe eventually pay for it. In this scenario, it only creates primary partitions (up to 255 on one drive or up to eight drives, SATA or PATA), below is my current partition scheme:
When I used to have Fedora 6 & 7, I would make a backup of it's partition once a week just before applying updates if it seemed to be running good, and delete the previous image. Because allot of times when you applied updates to Fedora, you had major issues upon a re-boot, so it was nice to have an image of it prior to applying the bad updates, sometimes all one needed to do was wait another week and do updates again and the bad update had a fix already, other times I would resolve the issue in various ways.
All my operating systems are backed up as an image file in the data partition and a copy in an external USB backup drive. The typical Linux partition would be approximately 55% used up, because bootitng does not include un-allocated space in it's images, the image of a typical Linux is 1.5GB in size compressed. The Windows and Mac OS X (which is on a PATA disk) are between 2GB & 2.6GB in size.
Here's the punch line:
I boot up the computer and write zeros across the bad Fedora (example), then re-create it's partition either in the same spot or in some other free space on the drive, then I paste a copy of the good Fedora image from the data partition in the new / partition and configure the boot menu to look at the new partition and boot it up. This entire procedure of wiping it out and loading an image takes 8 minutes on my Dell XPS Gen 5 with a Pentium 650 (3.4GHz processor). When creating an image of a 10GB Linux partition, takes only 4 minutes "tops".
And it's all done with a few clicks of the mouse, the only typing needed is when you give your partition/image a name.
The 30GB VM XP partition in my layout was derived from the 15GB Windows XP Pro image, then the partition was resized to 30GB in about a minute using the same boot manager/partition god. And if you don't install it in it's own 8MB partition to the drive, you'll have to stick to the traditional partitioning scheme with 3 primary, one extended, and 59 or so logical partitions. But you can use it's powerful features without obligation.