Data is on a separate partition ("My Documents" or whatever it is points to it, so users don't have to do anything different

What I would like to do is reinstall, add the right drivers, and customise according to the little tricks I've learned, such as turning off annoying messages: then back up the pristine fully working installation so that next time, I can just copy it into the partition without spending all that time. Then I could do it every week if necessary!
In the past, I investigated some tools for doing this, and tried some methods I found by searching, but could never quite get the hang of it - especially with members of my family suffering withdrawal symptoms from MSN and so on, pressing me to give them back their trusty Microsoft OS sooner rather than later.
Can anybody give me any suggestions?
My preferred method would be to just use dd or something equally basic from the command line. I don't mind keeping 10GB spare to house the backup. But when I looked into this a while ago, I was baffled by the finer points - for instance, exactly where to start and stop. The risk of screwing things up isn't too critical, because as I said, all data is on a separate partition.
I should mention that Windows (XP, but maybe I'll try 7 some time) is on the first partition. I'm somewhat hazy about how the bootloader is set up, but it's probably just what Salix does automatically when you ask it to include Windows as a boot option alongside Linux.
Thanks in advance!