hi , just loaded suse 10.3 onto a hdd , i am somewhat new to this and have very little work with this OS , the OS seems good , and loads into an ols system quite fast (running in 32 bit) but here is my question , i have loaded the OS onto a 10 gig hdd , now for some reason the space used has taken up about 6 gig , i have a 60 gig hdd on the way , is there any way i can image the 10 gig onto the 60? , or rather loading all the info again on the 60 can i set the 10 to slave and direct a fresh OS onto the 60 and update it from the 10 gig ? i only have a adsl connection and really dont want to sit and wait for 3 hours for all the info to download again if i can help it .
any help will do , i havent got the drive yet (waiting on mail) but if i can know this before it gets here would be good , i have yet not looked into this "new to me" OS , and i hope it doesnt burp , bleet , sag , sit , sting , or cause a complete "taking a dump" (memory) on me.

Using dd command is one way to solve this.

/dev/hda being partition and hdd where Suse is and /dev/hdb a target partition.You will maybe have to change drive letters.

I have cloned a laptop CD with an external HD, 160GB, using Puppy live CD. Ran dd to transfer my USB 1.0 HD, 20 GB in size to the external, noted the number of blocks transferred, then after swapping in the new HD in the laptop, reversed the dd command to copy the original 20GB to the new HD.

Then, using a Mandriva Install CD, I partitioned the new HD as wanted. All XP stuff still there, no hits for new hardware, no reinstall needed.

On another thread, someone said it is necessary to defrag XP before partitioning. Not with the partition function in Mandriva install CD. It compresses the XP stuff into the new partition as it resizes. Also, defrag on XP does not compress anyway.

hi , thanks for the replies , i think i will try just put a fresh OS of suse 10.3 on , ill change the 10 gig hdd to a slave , and direct the setup to look for the updates on the slave , ill let everyone know how it goes , xp has a different way of compressing files it is not in the defrag , to image a drive the program should do this as it makes an "image" i wanted to try suse as im pretty tired of clusters in xp , i have to deal with postec systems , POS systems and of course these all run 32 bit windows platform , just think it would be nice to have a choice in a OS running wetstock and other systems , rather than running a windows all the time , the more i can learn about linux systems the better chance i could give a "choice"
ill let you know how thing go .

I spent quite a bit of time trying to compress XP so I could re-partition, before I learned Mandriva CD#1 Install tools simply took care of it during resize. Blush! The XP defrag creates compressed clumps distributed across the partition, instead of compressing all of it to the front end as Win 98 defrag did. I have no idea what the resized by Mandriva partition looks like. I do know it doesn't take very long to get it all done.

This may not be relevant to anything you are doing, but sometimes others google to a posting, and a bit of extra information will help them.

hi all , well , it seems that due to i didnt have the partitions loaded onto the new drive suse went directly to the old one. missing drive a completly , , as for windows xp , well i dont run it on the same computer , and the defrag tool gives you with the OS , never if at all " compress all the drive , or place all back in the correct manner , ( mainly due to the hibernate ) if i ever have to change hdd with windows on it , then it is better off taking a "image" iso or what have you , true ? if placing onto a bigger hdd is it better to zip the files , photos music , text docs etc and place onto a dvd disk ? and replacing the OS with a fresh one ? lord only know it has to be done every now and then with windows OS , xp defrag tool is i thought rather lame , but suse i now have learned will seek the drive with the partitions on ignoring the master/slave rule , even when bios is set to the first drive ( i should of turned off the old drive in bios ) but never mind all part of learning this "new to me " OS.