repartition and/or format. is there a quick way?
 

One of theese days (*sigh*) I'll need to wipe my hd and reinstall the OSes (long story short: the reason is I need to reinstall winxp and the install cd refuses to recognise the actual partition table or something like that, so it's format time)

the bad thing about it is that my debian inst is of course fully functional and quite tuned to my needs, so I'd really like to avoid going through a complete reinstall from the ground up like I did the last time

Is there a "quick and easy" way to backup and restore everything after the format (a step by step tut would do the thing)?
to be honest I'm hoping in something like "tar up everything; format; untar down from knoppix".
but my fear is that is would be a little unrealistic :P I'm thinking about fstable and /dev issues mainly..

if that's not the case and the solution would take too much time I'm probably going to manually resize partitions, expand the linux one to the whole hd and simply buy another hd for win (but i'd prefer the first solution since I should remove the other hd and buy also an external case for it)
anyway can you suggest me a good and solid linux partitioning prog?

Knoppix (or some other LiveCD), 'partimage'.