hi all,

i'm looking at backing up my hd (winxp partition) before dual booting. i googled, but didn't find any comprehensive isntructions for my situation.

i have a new usb hard drive (unformated?) in a new hd case. my system picks up the drive.

are there any tutorials i missed as to how to back up the pratition?

my base hd is 80 mb and my usb is 200 mb - no problem there.

a couple questions i have off the bat...

1. do i need to format the usb drive before backing up? should i use ntfs or fat32?

2. should i partition my usb drive to be equal to my base hd or should it be larger? how much larger?

3. what's a good freeware program to do this? i understand there is a program in the ultimate boot cd (i can probably figure this out from the docs).

any other pointers / tips are appreciated.

tia...

There are a few unanswered items here. I assume you are going to re-install xp when you dual boot. If that's the case you can use xps file and transfer wizard to just back up what you want to save like my documents, mail, bookmarks,etc. Formatting is always a good idea. Use sys admin to format the usb drive the same as your system.

Partitioning depends on whether you just plan on using the usb drive as a temporary or permanent storage. xp comes with everything you need to do this. No point in re-inventing the wheel

leandean, i don't plan on removing my current install. i will shrink the partition and then add the linux partitions.

i should have said i want an image of my current hard drive so i can install the image should something blow up on me.

You could possibly boot off a CD with Knoppix or SuSE Live and then use dd copy. I haven't done it that way but I use it at work occasionally when I have to install a pre-configured OS on multiple machines. That way you wouldn't have to format the usb drive. If you want to partition the usb, give it about 10% more than you current drive size to be on the safe side. Your distribution entry says you have an older box so I would try it out on that machine first. Then after you do the image to the usb, use dd copy to copy it back to make sure everything is okay.

Or you can set your bios to boot off the usb drive to see if the OS comes up (if your bios supports it, of course).

when you say dd, i think disk druid. is this correct?

thanks for the help.

Do 'man dd' or 'info dd'. That will explain it better than I can dd does a sector copy of 1s and zeros so it is an exact copy of the source.