I have a friend whose laptop screen is in the process of dying. She's going to get it replaced, but they told her all of her data will be lost and that she should backup first.
I really like G4L for something like this. It's a bootable CD image that loads a lightweight version of linux and lets you take the entire hard drive partition and dump it on an FTP server. (It offers more than that with NFS, etc., but I use the FTP mostly).
It only comes in a CD-ROM ISO download, though. I was able to find some instructions on how to make the ISO bootable from a USB memory stick at this website: Look at the 3RD post, though - the first one is way too involved:
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1224777260
To summarize:
1. Download the G4L ISO from http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l
2. Download syslinux from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/ (I used 4.02 at the time)
3. Extract the G4L ISO to the root of your memory stick. You can use http://7-zip.org/)
4. Delete syslinux.cfg from the root of the USB stick
5. Rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg on the USB stick
6. Extract syslinux-X.XX.zip to somewhere on your harddrive (make it somewhere you can get a DOS prompt to easily) e.g. c:\syslinux
7. Start a command prompt and change to the directory where you unzipped syslinux (e.g. cd c:\syslinux) and then go to the win32 subdirectory (e.g. c:\syslinux\win32)
8. Type: syslinux.exe -m -a -d /boot F: (where "F" is the drive letter of the USB stick).
It's a little involved, but easily and quickly done with free tools. In a matter of minutes I was backing up the hard drive!
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