System rescue cd is stunningly useful. It may allow me to solve the problem with parrot_knight's laptop. YOu can copy a partition from one disk to another, resize partitions without losing data, reset a lost windows password, do some types of disc repair... and so on. I just used it to copy the bootable partition from a 160G drive to a new 500G drive for my laptop. I made the new partition much larger, of course ;-) It was not perfect, I had to fix the master boot record. Then it worked  fine. Oddly, the win7 release candidate disc fixed the boot record of a vista partition in seconds.

Some more free hard disk backup, clone, and restore software.

A way to set up a USB memory to be bootable.