fedora equivalent of recovery disk

[Paul Allen Newell]

[NOTE: there is a question at the end if you want to skip my reply to 
all the emails posted]

To all who have responded, many thanks. There were alot of queries to go 
through and I am only now at a point that I can take first look at them 
as a collective suggestion.

I wanted to clarify a couple questions.

I have no objection to buying a memory stick large enough to hold the 
image or an external hard drive. I did the following to see what I am 
dealing with "worst case scenario":

+++
[root at yoyo ~]# du -hs /
du: cannot access `/proc/2395/task/2395/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/2395/task/2395/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/2395/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/2395/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/home/paul/.gvfs': Permission denied
15G    /
[root at yoyo ~]#
+++

[not certain about the permission denied and no such file/directory ???]

So if I bump it one to be safe, I can see prices for 32GB stick between 
$35-$80. External hard drives for 500GB seem to be a bit more than 
double ($75-$200). Heck, if I am considering getting the laptop 
repaired, I already know that money will be moving out of my pocket. At 
least the stick and/or hard drive can have other uses besides this one 
emergency.

I would have preferred DVD set only because I wanted non-volatile memory 
... burned and checked before restoring MS opsys. I've had sticks drop 
info and hard drives can crash. But it is not a mandatory ... all of 
your comments make it seem like stick or hard drive is a reasonable way 
to go.

I am getting the sense that clonezilla is a good way to go compared to 
some of the other ideas and Joe Zeff's comment of "Clonezilla has its 
advantages, such as sanity checks and a progress bar" makes it sound 
like what I need as sanity checks are real important. My sense is that 
dd and/or ddrescue could be used but they were designed for other 
purposes and therefore clonezilla may be the closest match to what I 
want. I saw alot of other programs to look at, but the comment of 
usb/hdrive with Clonezilla seemed to be the majority suggestion of choice.

I just got finished testing that I can use external video port on the 
laptop (though I need a better cable) so I know that I can do the 
operation without worrying if the laptop's display craps out. Not to 
mention crapping out when restoring Vista from rescue disks.

Had the weird discovery that today it started out really bad (when it 
was first turned on and presumably cool) and got better the longer it 
stayed on. Overheating theory sinks in plausiblity and Jarmo's bad 
hardware / connections obsevation moves up.

The list has been very helpful on answers to this one and I appreciate 
it. I think its now up to me to get good VGA cable and probably 32GB 
stick and give Clonezilla a try.

My two questions are  ... am I correct in assuming that after I create 
the stick that I can boot off it to test that it is a working copy? and 
do I need partedmagic if all I want is clonezilla?

Thanks again,
Paul