A few days ago I was building a spare computer for my young daughter to play games on. I put a 98 install on a 4 GB drive (wintendo). Then when all was said and done, I found a spare 10 GB drive.

Basically I wanted to do two things: Create an image of the install (the install will probably get b0rked quickly), and clone the install to the larger drive.

I tried to dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb but that creates a 4 GB partition on the 10 GB. I don't want that. I wanted a 10 GB partition with the 4 GB installed files.

Also, if I did an image with partimage of the 4 GB drive, would it remove the blank space? I think the install was only 800 MB or something.

Also, the computer didn't have a floppy drive, so I was messing around in knoppix (I love knoppix). Does anybody recommend a different bootable distro? Or a rescue disk type distro with lots of recovery utilities? Is fdisk the best drive partitioner for linux? Is there something better?

Anyways, I ended up creating a bootable CD with Ghost 2003 on it and using that. But I'm quite curious for future's sake. I work on personal PC's all the time.

TIA,
Exo

I would recommend you "Acronis TrueImage 7.0".
It's the only cloning software that I know of that understands reiserfs partitions. That would mean creating 6-700MB images instead of 4-5GB

Bye
Dario Delpiano

If you have a modern version of Knoppix, just use qparted (after dd to copy the image like you did) to resize the partition to 10G. QParted is a QT front end of Parted which should be able to resize the partition.

Cheers,
-b

I think I have Knoppix 3.3. Is that recent enough? I'll check next time I boot it up though. Can parted handle NTFS? I'll check into it.

Thanks bobzibub,
Exo