Norton Ghost usage?

Hello peeps !

I’ve freshly installed my faithful winxp on a vista-branded dell laptop, and while I still have to iron out some of the bumps (like why the hell my windows key doesn’t work, for instance win-r to ‘run’ - or why newly created shortcuts don’t have icons) I know that in a weeks time I will hopefuly have a good, relatively stable OS with base system insalled (tools codecs, etc)

I have yet to install fedora on the same machine.

My question to you, all-knowledgable kirupians, is, using Norton Save and Restore (old-ish ghost version), how can I backup my winxp system to improvement deployment at a later state ?

Will it kill my partitions ? Do I need/can I do it in Linux? Can I make a system ghost whilst running the said system ?
I have yet to partition my disk, what would you recommend ?

Ahh, I’ve never done it before, so I’m confused. Any ideas ?