I’m about ready to wipe out my laptop’s hard drive and reinstall, but wanted to back it up first, just in case there is something I need on it in the future.   I was searching for open-source alternatives to Symantec Ghost and came across CloneZilla which looked like it would do the trick.   It is available as a Linux-based Live CD so that you can just boot off it and go.   With just a few minutes of playing with it, I was able to back up my entire laptop hard drive to a Samba share on a Windows PC.