[plug] backing up and restoring hard drive image

[Jason]

greetings all.

the hard drive in my laptop has decided to die (this is the laptop's second hard drive - the first failed in a similar fashion) and I need to return 
the hard drive for warranty purposes, but won't get a new drive until they confirm the hard drive is b0rked.

I want to dd the hard drive to create a backup image and store that on another machine, then, once I get the new hard drive, restore that image so 
the computer won't realise anything has happened.

can anyone recommend a distro that I can boot from a cd which will allow me to ftp the backup image into some form of temporary FS, either on 
the drive or in memory, which I can then restore using dd?

thanks in advance,

jason.