hi all,

can anyone point to me to a good tutorial to back up my hard drive to an external usb hard drive? i'm looking for:

1. how to back it up (home and whole shebang - orperating system and all. i guess i'm talking about imaging a hard drive, too).
2. how to restore it (w/o any risk of blowing up my install if my back up is done wrong).

if a good tutorial exists, i can follow it so there is no need to spend too much time here if you know a good tutorial.

tia..

ps - i want to dual boot my winxp laptop. i wasn't able to move all the data to one side of the drive, though. is there any way to do this?

tia, again...

For backups in Linux, I prefer Dar. If you are a Linux user, using Kde, there is also Kdar, a GUI front end for Dar. Dar is a command line utility with a good tutorial. Once you get it figured out, it's great. Testing a backup is easy. Restoring part or all is easy. The tutorial guides you step by step. You can even include Dar files in the backup so that you can first restore Dar, then restore the rest of the backup.

For partitioning your xp, I'd suggest Partition Magic. Resize your xp via PM. It will move files into the resized xp partition. Then use either PM to create and format a Linux partition (and a swap partition), or use a Linux installation cd to format the unused space into a Linux and Swap partition.

I've had good luck both ways. Though I no longer use windows; that's how I did it when I still had that *other os* on my computer.

Thanks for the tip on Kdar.

BTW, I have had much better luck w/ Acronis than PM -- Acronis is much easier to use as a live CD, & I think a live CD is a much better way to do this -- no messing w/ open files. Think brain surgeon trying to operate on his own head!

Don't forget to defrag XP before you repartition.