I've nearly converted one of my friends into a Linux user. He's willing to accept the learning curve and I know he'll adapt. But he DOS (pun intended) need Windows for his precious multimillion-dollar copy of Flash. I have a few questions (more on the way as the install progresses):

1. Is there any way to back up a single partition Windows system w/o an external hard drive or DVD (and only possibly CD) burning capabilities? He shelled out the big bucks for Flash but won't buy an external HD. (More specs when I can get ahold of him)

2. Does FDisk support non-destructive NFTS partition resizing or do I need to download the GParted live CD?

EDIT:
3. How good of a compression scheme does tar.gz or bzip have? How big would a compressed 14gb file be?

Actually he went and bought a DVD burner. So now I have a slightly easier backup job.

The compression ratio depends on what kind of data you're compressing, and the layout of the bytes in the data. For example, an audio file that is already compressed (like OGG or MP3) will not compress much; video files won't either. But flat text will.

As an example, I've got the project Gutenberg text of the Divine Comedy weighing in at 663973 bytes. Gzip compression decreases it to 256169 bytes. Bzip2 compression brings it down further to 185552 bytes.

Generally, bz2 compression is better than gz.

I think he's got a lot of music (aac), but he might be able to get rid of some stuff. Thanks.

fdisk will not resize partitions.
The GParted CD is not that big to download - 30MB or so if my memory is correct.

OK. On cable internet, that's not torture. The slackware ISO's killed me, but this should be fine. So 663973->185552 bzipped is about 3->1. 14 gigs should be 4-5 gigs... If he gets rid of enough stuff, it'll fit on a DVD! I think I've almost got this figured out! Thanks everyone.

Any advice for shrinking Windows, installing Linux, and teaching a newbie?

Make sure to tell them about LinuxQuestions!

Do you know what distro they're going to use? Ubuntu has great community support and is very easy to use. Or if they're already a technical user they should have no great problem picking up the Slack (heheh) or FreeBSD.

Of course!

I'm thinking Slack. He's a techie who's sick of Windows but hasn't taken the leap to Linux yet. He's not scared of the command line (a must).

About Ubuntu:
I'm trying to install it now. I just burned a corrupted CD that tried to overwrite Slack . I need to fix a lot of config files now. It's not so easy after all.