My brother has an "older" dell laptop (PIII) that is simply too slow. At the moment it has Windows 2000 installed on the 8GB hd. I want to add an 8GB partition an external hd that I have and mirror the M$ installation to the new partition. Then wipe his drive clean and install debian. I want the backup in-case he still doesn't like it. That way I can mirror the M$ install back onto the hd for him to sell. What is the best program to do this? (Linux or Windows).
Any input is appreciated. Thanks.

*EDIT* The reason that I ask, is that I do not have a Windows 2000 install disk.

check out the thread here on learning dd. might be a good start, there are also commercial apps like ghost that create a proprietary compressed image of a partition, but they cost money.

I would use dd and do a raw copy of the hdd to a file on the external hdd:
Edit: didn't realise someone had already answered, that'll teach me to watch films while reading forums.

You want the dd command. In your case, you'll need to run from a live CD. You can clone the whole drive, or just a partition. In your case, I think you want the whole thing--mbr, etc.

The simplest example would be:

dd if=/dev/xxx of=/dev/yyy

xxx is the internal drive (as seen by the liveCD Linux--do fdisk -l to make sure what device names to use)
yyy is the external drive (ditto)

This copies with the default block size (512) until there is no more data. You can make it faster with a larger block size.

Thanks for the replies. I'll try the dd command tonight and post back. Thanks.

dd is a very slow solution for copying file systems. I use partimage to backup and restore partitions and it is very quick because it compresses on-the-fly and it can also skip over empty space in the partition.

If you create a partimage image and then restore it, you will probably save yourself several hours of waiting for dd. Also, partimage displays its progress. If you want to measure the progress of dd, you have to repeatedly run "ls -a", or the equivalent.

I have backed up 8 GB partitions to a drive over the network that only took 30 minutes. That would have been a several hour long job with dd.

partimage support for NTFS and Windows 2000/XP is experimental. dd doesn't care what the file system is because it is a raw copy. For transferring over a network you would do well to pipe the output of dd through gzip or bzip2

I have been using the "experimental" support for over a year now. It is rock solid. I have been able to backup and restore every type of NTFS partition without any problems.

> dd is a very slow solution for copying file systems.

Yep, sure is if you use a small block size. Use a big one,
like 'bs=4096000'. Much faster.