Procedure[]
There are various cloning solutions for different purposes.
FOG[]
FOG, the Free, Opensource Ghost can image machines remotely, by letting the clients boot a network PXE system, that restores an image onto the client.
Clonezilla[]
Clonezilla can image the machines via a liveCD to/from either a usb drive or over the network. Clonezilla has a very simple wizard.
dd[]
Or you could perhaps just use plain dd, which is a command that comes with most linux distributions. This gives you raw disk copy and all the linux command-line flexibility that comes with it.
To backup the mbr of /dev/hda:
dd if=/dev/hda of=disk.mbr bs=512 count=1
To restore the mbr of /dev/hda:
dd if=disk.mbr of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
To only restore the partition table of /dev/hda:
dd if=disk.mbr of=/dev/hda bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446
Windows issues[]
Cloning a windows machine requires a sysprep or likewise if the hardware on the cloned machine is not close to identical to the clone source machine.
Suggestions[]
The clonezilla image could be customed to save your most common options, or at least default to them. If anybody makes such a thing, please add a howto on this article.