Hello, I currently have all my data on an NTFS partition on a 500gb hard drive. I recently bought a 640gb hard drive that I want to use as my main drive so I will have more room to set up a dual boot, while leaving the 500gb drive empty for backups and shared storage. I'm planning on just booting up a live CD and using dd to copy all of the data. Will there be any problems because the disks are not the same capacity? Will the extra 140gb be available to use if I am copying from a smaller hard drive? Also, the 500gb drive will still have the Windows bootloader on it after I remove the partitions, how can I remove this bootloader? Thanks in advance for the help.

Don't. Cloning a drive is a very bad idea.
I might try ntfsclone, but I tend to just leave Windoze alone and add a new drive for Linux.

I don't think the size of the HD is a problem. try info dd

Ok, I guess I'll just reinstall vista on the larger hard drive and make one big FAT32 partition for shared storage on the 500gb drive. Will the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1" properly erase the MBR+Partion table of the drive so I don't have to worry about the BIOS trying to boot from this drive anymore?

If you're prepared to re-install, setup a partition on the new drive and try ntfsclone (from Linux). Fixing the mbr from recovery console on the Windoze install CD should be all that's needed (for Vista use bootrec.exe). Will be educational - pls post back if you do this.
If it doesn't work, do the full re-install.

As for the dd query, yes that will do it. Better option might be to change the BIOS boot disk - will make any Windows install easier.

Actually, I just remembered that the program I use for backups, Acronis true image(BTW, I'm trying to find a free software alternative. Any suggestions?) , has a partition cloning tool. I'll just use that to copy my windoze partition, use bootrec to get the bootloader setup. Then I'll install my linux distro in the free space.

I don't like imaging solutions - for backups, maybe keep an eye on the members choice award thread here.

Partimage - works fo me even for ntfs cloning and better than dd