Maximum PC

I'm looking for a back up solution that supersedes Windows. Right now I've got a dual boat system running both XP and Win7 home. I currently use an OLD version of Norton Ghost on a Floppy disk (yes, I still have a floppy drive in my box) that I boot off of and back up my main drive to an identical drive that I hook up to the mobo before booting up.

Now that I have the main drive partitioned into two drives my back up copy from Norton Ghost doesn't work. I can't boot my back up copy into XP any more as it says it's having problems with the ntldr file.

Long story short, what's the best backup program that I can boot into, make a perfect drive copy from (including boot sector and blank space – no ntldr errors), and is preferably free? I actually made a Linux (Knoppix) flash drive from an article in MaxPC that works great. My mobo allows me to boot off the USB drive and I was looking for ghosting programs that run in Linux but none of the three I've found have worked for me.

Any advice? Please keep in mind that it has to work OUTSIDE of Windows as Windows will invariably crash and burn at some point in time; and a back up is no good if I can't launch the program to restore it if the OS it's in is “kaput”.

Clonezilla

or you could always break out he live disk and just use dd.

"break out the live disk and just use dd"

What's DD?

Beats me.
At any rate, I use Macrium Reflect Free.
Your drive image gets backed up to another drive or disc. When you need to reinstall the image, you boot your PC with the Linux-based recovery-startup disc that you create, find your drive image, click a few buttons and presto.
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

the actual command you use. IIRC it stood for data duplicator (or duplication). This is a pretty good page on how to accomplish that...

http://www.linuxweblog.com/dd-image

I see, thanks. It took some doing but I did manage to get Clonezilla to copy my main drive to the back up drive (identical). Booted it off a CD, so that works for me.