i was snowed in today so i couldnt go to work, i proceeded to do what i was putting off for a while which was upgrading my linux and windows installations to 64 bit versions.

k so i installed windows vista first since i know it likes to be stupid and overwrite bootloaders. then i installed opensuse 11.1 and spent several hours making it just the way i like it. so now it is essencially perfect.

issue was it somehow messed up my ability to boot into vista. so i deleted the vista partition and was gonna reinstall it (and reinstall the opensuse bootloader manually) but now it seems to complain about the partition it is on. set up is

50gb opensuse
150gb vista
50gb free
1 gb swap

probably because it is past that xxxx cylinder mark or somehting, although it did install fine before i installed opensuse.

so the issue is that i dont want to lose the opensuse installation i just did because i put lots of work into it. i dont mind switching the two partitions around if it really cares so much. i just dont want to do all that configuring and crap all over again.

any way i can copy the installation from the first 50 gig partiton to the second one. i can take care of the bootloader manually. for all i can think of i should be able to copy the files over since fstab with opensuse uses the drive model number instead of sdX#. grub can be fixed easily.

or somehow make it into an image that i can install from but i dont think it would fit on a disk, it is 7.67gb.

any ideas?

Sure - you can use OpenSUSE to put a file-system on that partition, then just cp all the files over.
You'll have to edit menu.lst and fstab to reflect the changes.

It can depend on the installation - for instance, if OpenSUSE is installed to LVM, there could be trouble.

Other methods - you can install an additional OpenSUSE to the new partition, then use cp or another backup software to copy over only the bits that are different.

You can use backup software to save our old config, then restore the backup to the now partition. For that matter, you can backup your install, then install Vista as planned, then restore OpenSUSE from backup.

Or to be safe, copy it elsewhere using dd. You can pipe that through split if you need to.

thanks for the help. that worked out great. see you all later.