alright, i'm fed up with the state my windows partition has been in lately.

windows 2k is failing me badly, i need windows so i don't want to format completely, i also need the hoards of data which exist on my 60 gigabyte drive.

my system setup is currently like this:

1 60 gig drive, primary master, and boot disk. 2 partitions, 55 gig NTFS(win2k), 2 gig fat32(for swapping files.).

my 15 gig drive is primary slave, with 2 partitions as well. 12 gig EXT3 @ '/' and a 3 gig swap...(3 gig is over kill isn't it?).

i would like to partiton my ntfs disk so that i can save some of the data, and have it setup like this in the end.
(i use mandrake with ntffs resize, so i can resize the disk to how i want.)

http://reblended.com/www/dittohead/images/DISK.png

is it possible then to copy over my existing linux "stuffes" over to my sixty gig without losing any data, and without rebuilding anything?

my 15 gig is a tad slow, and i need to rebuild windows. i can lose windows, just not the data i have.

the 15 gig would be used as the "fatswap".

thanks for youe help, it is greatly appriciated!!

Last I heard, the linux ntfs driver is experimental, so it's a little risky, but you could try mounting it and copying you files over (possibly as a tar file). You could also try doing it from windows with something like ltools or Ext2Fsd.

is it possible to move linux over to the 60 gig drive, in it's own partition, then boot up normally?

Sure. You can create an equal sized partion on the 60 gig drive and use the "dd" command to copy the whole filesystem. Then you just set up the boot loader. You don't have to use dd. You could also format the new partion and copy the files using the "cp -a" (and set up the boot loader).

so all my config files would still work...awesome. thanks so very much.