Hello everyone here is my situation. I currently have a comp running winxp with 2 hard drives (one 120GB and one 250GB.) The 120 is currently on the verge of dying (very loud screeching, taking 10 min to boot into) and this is the one windows boots off of. What I would like to do is copy both of these hard drives to a 160 GB hard drive I have running suse9.2 on another computer (I only have a total of 150 GB used between the 2 harddrives) I have read the article http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...icle&artid=430 however when I add one of the harddrives to my SUSE system it recognizes but wants to partition it before I can use it. Is it possible to do this (dump both onto the 160?) I will be checking back on it regularly but any help is greatly appreciated.

Does your SUSE distro have any partition-resize-and-copy tool? I suppose it has. I'd definately use it if it's there.

For manual labour:

Be root

type 'mount' to see which partitions are mounted (and thus can be u(n)mounted).

To see the names of the partitions on /dev/hda: type 'fdisk /dev/hda' and type p at the prompt.

man mount: read all about mounting. You'll need the name and partition number like (dev/hdc2).
And you need a directroy to mount it on, for example
cd /mnt
mkdir mountforhdc2
(I like very descriptive names when things are risky)

then, mount it!

mount -t ntfs /dev/hdc2 /mnt/mountforhdc2

when copying, you could use cp -rp /mnt/[from/]* /mnt/[to/]
-r to copy underlying directories
-p to preserve the time stamps of the files

Caveat: IFAIK you cannot install windows on a disk that already has linux patitions on it. So install Win on a blank disk, then add linux.