Try Clonezilla. It's free and works great.
It only images the used space of a drive or partition to help keep the resulting image size small.
It uses a compression scheme that further reduces the image size by about 50%.
It will image NTFS, Fat 32 and all the various Linux filesystems.
The image can be saved while it's being created to a USB thumb drive, USB external hard drive, internal drive or another partition
on the same drive.
It can even be saved to a network share.
To avoid the 4 GB file size restriction of Fat 32 storage media it will automatically split the image into 2 GB pieces by default.
You can restore the image from any media and copy it to another location if needed (like to a DVD for instance).
It is a Live CD (it can also be run from a USB thumb drive Live) and runs outside Windows.
This means it is booted and runs in system ram.
It won't touch your hard drive unless you tell it to, like when you do a restore or save an image to a separate partition.
Clonezilla Live is under active development and updates are frequent.
There are test releases as well as stable releases.
There are versions available to take advantage of multicore processors as well as 64 bit processors.
Link Removed due to 404 Error The latest stable release is Clonezilla-Live-1.2.6-24-i686 for multicore, i486 for any computer or amd64 if you want to run it with a 64 bit machine. The i486 will work on any machine while the i686 will utilize the multicore capability of a multicore processore and perform quicker.
Same with the amd64.
You would burn the .iso to a CD or install it on a USB thumb drive (if your computer can boot a USB device).
There is a tool called Unetbootin that can make short work of creating a USB flash Clonezilla live.
UNetbootin - Homepage and Downloads The Windows version is a standalone app.
Download the .exe and run it.
You would format the thumb drive to Fat 32 and plug it in and start Unetbootin.
Skip the first field (distribution) and select the radio button for "diskimage" and use the browse button on the right to locate the Clonezilla .iso you previously downloaded and click OK. When Unetbootin is done you will have Clonezilla on a thumb drive.
Boot to it like you would a Clonezilla Live CD.
I have posted a guide to using Clonezilla at another forum.
A guide to using Clonezilla - Scot's Newsletter Forums There are also instructions at the Clonezilla web site complete with screen shots and a community forum is maintained as well.
Once you use Clonezilla a couple of times it will become old hat.
Clonezilla is fast. I use it to image my 13 GB Win 7 install and it takes about 9 minutes to create and save the image to a 200 GB external hard drive. The resulting image is about 6 GB in size.
Restoring from the external drive takes about 5 minutes.
Your mileage may vary.