Hello, I was wondering if I could get any of your expert knowledge on this subject.

This is my setup right now:
120gb hdd with a full NTFS partition (only Windows XP installed),
I just purchased a 250gb hdd, but I want to copy the full NTFS partition onto the new drive, but only using 200gb of the full size, leaving whatevers rest to do a linux dualboot.

I heard that QtParted can do something similar, or NTFSresize will do this, but I would like some clearification on this matter, as the information on my older drive is very important to me and it would suck losing the data on it.

Is there any Linux LiveCD that can do this sort of thing for me, or am I forced to either buy partition magic (I heard it does this sort of thing), or just do a full reinstall of windows (I also don't want to do this, as I have a shitload of programs, developer tools, and stuff configured on it).

Thanks for your insight,
Matthew

1. Attach your new 250GB hard-drive as the first master harddrive, and slave the 120GB to it. Assume that the 250GB hard drive is /dev/hda and your 120GB is /dev/hdb. Further assume that Windows is on the first partition of the 120GB disk, and you want it on the first partition of the 250GB disk.

2. Boot with a Knoppix LiveCD, then open a root terminal.

3. As root, use the command: dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/dev/hda1 bs=1M

4. The above dd command will copy the Windows partition from /dev/hdb1 to /dev/hda1. The resulting /dev/hda1 partition will be 120GB also. Now you must resize /dev/hda1 to 200GB.

5. While still in Knoppix, run QTParted and resize the /dev/hda1 partition to 200GB.

6. Turn off the computer, remove the 120GB hard drive, but keep it around for a while, just in case you need to restore data from it.

7. If you want to be able to boot your 250GB hard drive into Windows, reboot the computer with your Windows XP CD, and enter the recovery console. From the "DOS Prompt", run FIXMBR. Remove the Windows CD and reboot the computer; it should boot into Windows. If this doesn't work, you may have to repeat this step, but run FIXBOOT after FIXMBR.

8. When you do your Linux install, you will probably want to dual-boot. I can attest that Ubuntu will do this for you automagically, but something like Slackware requires manual configuration. If you're stuck, search this site for "dual booting", or google it. Here is a site on dual-booting: http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/

Thanks for the information, I tried that out but the thing is when trying to boot off of the 250gb drive, it says "PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK", or something to that effect, I tried running the FIXMBR command (it's FIXBOOT in the WinXP recovery cd), it says it completed the command normally, of course try and boot it says the same thing.

Now I'm moving the 200gb partition up 100mb, so I can install grub into the boot information so it will hopefully boot.

I just need to google me some information on how to get winxp to boot from grub (and how to install grub).

Most distros will install grub as part of the installation process (except Slackware, which installs lilo by default). Ubuntu automatically installs and configures grub to detect and dual-boot an existing WinXP partition, with no user intervention required.

However, this requires that your WinXP partition has a working master boot record, so you need to fix this problem first before installing Linux.

My Dell Windows XP Recovery CD has both FIXMBR and FIXBOOT, so I don't know if this discrepancy is affecting anything or not. I've transferred my Windows XP partition twice (from an original 40GB hdd to 80GB hdd, and now to a 100GB hdd) using the method I described above.

Perhaps try copying the original WinXP partition again from the 120 GB to the 250 GB drive, but run the Windows XP Recovery CD and FIXBOOT before resizing the NTFS partition.

Assuming your not using grub/lilo yet, this means the bios can't find the NT bootloader. If you get an error message about not being able to find the kernel, more then likely boot.ini is pointing to the wrong partition.

Also as a side note, FIXMBR and FIXBOOT messed up my linux partitions to the point where I didn't know how to fix it. I recommend running these commands before you apply any non-windows OS on the drive.

Ugh ... NTFS is usually not happy being moved around. Resizing is generally o.k., but moving to new disks like this is problematic.
Make the new partition bootable - can be done from Knoppix. That way the XP CD will allow you to run FIXMBR as mentioned above (different command to FIXBOOT).

Then try a re-boot.

Well, I got quite a bit farther than last time now, I got my ArchLinux dualboot working, but when I try and boot into Windows it says "Corrupt: hal.dll", and I'm 100% sure it's not corrupt as the checksum for the file on the new drive and old are the same.

The problem I think is that once transfering from the old hdd to the new, some registry just (ie device id's) of the new hard drive wouldn't have been changed. It would have probably worked if I didn't need to boot off the drive, but now I gotta figure out a way to restore all the permissions and crap from the registry hive.

as a last resort you can repair the install using your cd. To do this just use the cd like you would a normal install but when your at the partition selection area choose to repair instead of a fresh install. This should replace all the system files. also I recommend googling exactly what error message your receiving because windows like to report faulty errors that aren't true when there are other problems.