Although the dd command is a great option for creating images of partitions, it creates a bit-by-bit copy so that it also copies empty space, making your partition large and slow to create. Partimage has the advantage of only copying your data to the image.

Clonezilla is a Ncurses-based front-end to a set of scripts that use several open source disk utilities such as Partimage, ntfsclone, Partclone and dd. It'll jump at your command and duplicate particular partitions, or better still complete disks. It'll also restore the partitions, and help you mirror an old disk onto a bigger new disk.

Backups are usually made in one of two ways - either file-based which means that single files are backed up, often via synchronization and on an external disk, or image-based which means that a whole partition is stuffed into an image file that can be restored on the partition, containing everything there was on it.

KDE Partition Manager allows you to manage your disks, partitions and file systems: Create, resize, delete, copy, backup and restore partitions with a large number of supported file systems (ext2/3, reiserfs, NTFS, FAT32 and more).

By default, the installer creates just two partitions on which the system is installed. These are for the root and Swap partitions. While those may be good enough for some users, others might want to create a custom set of partitions. If you belong to the latter group, this tutorial provides a guide on how to create your custom set of partitions.

If you follow common partitioning advice, chances are your disk uses several partitions. If you set the sizes incorrectly or if your needs change, you may find yourself needing to resize your partitions. To do so, you must familiarize yourself with the requirements for resizing partitions and the tools that can do the job.

GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) is a wonderful open source application that will allow you to easily work with the partitions of your HD. You can add, delete, resize, copy, and move partitions all with an easy interface.

Backing up partitions and hard disks sounds like work -- until you've tried Clonezilla. With Clonezilla you can clone and duplicate partitions of various formats and disks of various sizes locally or over the network. Even more impressive is the fact that you can do all this without typing complicated commands.

Good graphical interface to manage your partitions, re size them, delete them or create them.