[Wolves] System Backup

[rob]

It's been rather quiet on the list so far, so I thought I'd use the 
opportunity to ask some questions.

I'm happy with my basic setup at the moment, so before monkeying around with 
it and installing new packages I thought it best that I take a backup of it.

I'm guessing that I need to create a new partition (I only have one HDD on 
this computer) and copy an image onto that.  The HDD is plenty big enough 
(18Gb).  Before starting, would I have to perform the Linux equivalent of a 
Windows defrag?

I have Norton Ghost and a live knoppix CD.  I'm guessing that Norton Ghost 
uses a different filesystem to Linux so it's best to use knoppix.  Am I 
right?

So presumably the procedure would be:

Boot to live knoppix CD
Unmount hda (if necessary)
create new partition using parted
use dd to create the image

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

rob