I need partition magic and ghost replacements - don't need too many features though
 

Alright guys, I just went cold turkey. No more Windoze. I have no need for NTFS now.

I don't mind spending a little money, but Partition Magic and Norton Ghost are just too expensive. I don't need to use them THAT much.

So, I need a program to back up ext3 partitions like ghost does (or at least something as effective). It would be nice if the program would support cd burning too, but I'll live if it can't.

If the ghost replacement only works with fat32 partitions (to save images to the hard drive), then I also need a program to shrink and expand fat32 partitions without destroying my data (or whatever file system it does support).

I've been searching for these programs for linux and dos with no luck. I can't seem to get anyone to tell me that *X program* can do this stuff and there is a stable version available (or a version that is stable but not officially declaired stable -- *grub comes to mind*).

Lastly, I'd like to add that I think this site is great and full of nice people willing to help us newbies! Thanks a lot guys. You're doing a lot for the Linux community. A lot of us newbies are future programmers and IT guys ya know? Personally, I'm a java and c++ programmer. Maybe I'll make a front end to some of this disk software and we'll give PowerQuest a kick in the nuts! I have yet to get into programming for Linux yet, however. =)

QTParted, a partition manager with GUI interface -- http://qtparted.sourceforge.net

Note that Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and other mainstream distros have custom partition managers and resizers (like Disk Drake, Disk Druid, etc) as part of their installation utilities. Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net), a bootable LiveCD distro, includes qtparted, which is really handy for repairs and recoveries. Also, I think that Mepis (http://www.mepis.org) uses qtparted in its installation.

Partition Image, a gpl equivalent to ghost -- http://www.partimage.org
I've never used it, but it seems to be what you are looking for.

Actually, you don't need to search further, all the tools are at your hand... For Partition Magic replacement, I can't seem to find a better resizing tool than PQMagic, but many distros comes with FIPS, DOS text mode partition resizer, I don't know whether it can handle NTFS or not...

For backup purpose, you can use tar to back-up your existing ext3 partitions.
For backing-up your entire partition blindly, you can use dd (diskdump) tool to dump the content of all your partition to a file, it's like making image of your partition, unfortunately, it will dump including empty spaces of your partition, luckiliy there is a way to compress them using gzip or bzip like:

dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip -c > backup.gz
or
dd if=/dev/hda1 | bzip2 > backup.bz2

and to recover it you can:

gunzip < backup.gz | dd of=/dev/hda1
or
bunzip2 < backup.bz2 | dd of=/dev/hda1

But the drawback using this, is the partition size should exact the same with the one which backed-up from...

hope this help...

thx a lot
 

You guys just know everything don't ya? Thanks a lot!

PS- Where do little penguins come from?

WOOOT!!
 

Check this out!!!

http://www.sysresccd.org/

It's awesome! Everything I need!