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Free Backup tool (Like Norton Ghost)

I'm trying to install Linux on my computer (along side XP) but I don't want to reinstall all the software I have on windows to do it. Preferably I'd just like to resize my NTFS partition to make room, but when I tried with QTParted on the system rescue cd (www.sysresccd.org) it said that my drive had bad sectors even though I had already done a full scandisk and defrag in windows. So I guess since I can't resize the next possible option is to find an app that can make an image of my hd and then restore it later. This way I could delete my windows paritition, make one for linux, make another windows partition and restore to it. Does anyone know of a free app that would do this for windows partitions, something like Norton Ghost?

http://www.partimage.org/
or
man dd
:} ...

Cheers,
Tink

Quote:

http://www.partimage.org/

will either of those handle a NTFS partition though? That is essential to making this work for me. Could I then use Partimage to restore my windows install from system rescue cd?
found this in partimage's FAQ:

Quote:

You can't restore to a smaller partition (you will have an error), but it's possible to restore to a lager one. In this case, some space will be lost (I suppose the OS cannot use all the size). Partimage don't have a resize feature, but you can use other tools. I'd like to add this in the future too. It will allow to restore into a smaller or larger partition. Indeed, as Partimage is low level it uses data blocks. So r esizing is possible, but that's a complex feature to implement. With some File Systems made to be easily re-sizable (as NTFS, ext2, ReiserFS), it may be easy, but with FAT, it's hard to do. For example, when resizing from 1,5 GB to 3 GB, you must change FAT16 into FAT32... You can use GNU Parted to do it.

so how could I do it? I would want to restore to a smaller partition. Is this possible. Would I have to try deleting my current partition, make another one the same size and hope qtparted will let me resize it (even though it wouldn't let me resize this one) and then restore and then shrink back down?

NTFS support in part-image is experimental ( I've never used
it) ... dd doesn't care, it takes copies of the PHYSICAL structure
of the HDD and doesn't give an owls hoot about the fs on it.

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=my_part.img
You'd need to make sure (in that scenario) that the target
space is ideally the same size as the original partition.

[edit]
Forgot to mention
http://www.mondorescue.org/
[/edit]

Cheers,
Tink

Quote:

Forgot to mention
http://www.mondorescue.org/

That looks interesting. So would that let me burn an image about 15 GB to several dvds and then restore from that? Also how would I use that, since I don't have linux installed or another hd? Is there a live-cd that I could use that has that installed?