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Bootitng is an amazing combination of tools but it is best to use it for making your partitions also. It aligns it's partitions according to C.H.S. values accurately compared to other partitioning tools, what this boils down to is that a compressed image created by bootitng of an existing partition not created by bootitng may require a slightly smaller/larger partition to restore the image by a couple bytes if the existing partition is not accurately aligned to C.H.S. values before the image was made. But, you can try it and make an image, then go through some of the restore steps without actually having a partition to put it in and it will tell you what size of partition the image needs. You can use it for free, if you install it for the boot manager features you get 30 days free trial to play with it and decide whether to pay $35.00 US or just remove it, (or put up with the warnings and keep using it for ever). It is shareware.
The images are compressed and only data, not free space is in the image. My Fedora uses opproximately 6GB of it's 10GB partition and the image(s) are around 1.5GB which I store in a shared data partition on my multi-boot computer and a copy on my USB drive for backup. You can send the image as it is being created to USB pen drive, USB hard drive, CD's, DVD, data partition/drive, etc.
Having bootitng installed and payed for I can use it to wipe (write 0's across the space) the messed up (if I mess it up), 10GB partition and make a new 10GB partition and re-load the image in around 8 minutes with P4 3.4Ghz processor. The other day I was desperate to recover some accidently deleted data on a customer's computer HDD and downloaded and installed what was disguised as Undelete software which was actually an .EXE type virus, my AVG anti-virus spotted it a few minutes later and said it took care of it, but it kept coming back, I had no fear, I re-booted the computer and spent a few minutes to wipe out my Win XP on a 15GB partition, re-loaded the fresh fully updated installation image of it and re-booted in a clean "no virus" environment and carried on in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee.
I use expensive 30 trial video editing software for putting together great DVD copies of old VHS movies, when the 30 days are up, I wipe out the partition I was using, re-load an image, re-size the partition (Win XP), with bootitng to 40GB to have enough room for editing video, and re-install another 30 days trial from the .exe that is stored on the data partition. In about a half hour I'm back editing video with a nice full featured editing suite.
I have Fedora which is a little quirky, when a new kernel update comes out, because I've had some kmod-nvidia packages give me problems in the past, I make an image of the smooth running Fedora before applying updates. Then after a week, if everything seems OK, I'll make another image and get rid of the one before, then apply the next batch of updates. Fedora has this "dependency hell" issue that does not bother me thanks to bootitng.
Some times I'll have up to three copies of Fedora on the same drive, all made from the same image, all using same shared /home partition and user when testing out software or whatever instead of taking chances with the smooth clean casual use copy. I can do that with any OS.
If you just want to image your existing partitions, check out their other products, Image for Linux, and Image for Windows.
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/
