W. Curtis Preston's excellent Unix Backup & Recovery. This is the book that got me started on this bare metal recovery stuff. I highly recommend it; read my review.
A list of small Linux disties.
tomsrtbt, "The most Linux on 1 floppy disk." Tom also has links to other small disties.
The Linux Documentation Project. See particularly the "LILO, Linux Crash Rescue HOW-TO"
The Free Software Foundation's parted for editing (enlarging, shrinking, moving) partitions.
Partition Image for backing up partitions.
Hugo Rabson's Mondo "... creates one or more bootable Rescue CD's (or tape+floppies) containing some or all of your filesystem. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore from bare metal."