Create Image From Recovery Disk

I am a new user and not finding the breadcrumb that I need to do what I want. I want to create an image of a partition that does not have Ghost installed on it. I have a computer that I want to create a ghost image of, so I can restore the system in the event of a hard drive failure. I cannot and do not want to install the software on that system itself. I want to image the partition without effecting the partition. I want to boot from the recovery cd and image the partition making no changes to the system itself. I know that I must be missing something obvious.