I've searched through the forum and have seen so many different options recommended by so many different people. But I don't know what would be the best route for me to go about doing this.

I have two computers, one running windows and one running linux. Both of them have an identical 200 GB hard drive. The problem: hard drive in windows computer has died. I've tried it other computers to see if it's the drive and it's the same thing every time, lots of noise, nothing happening. The windows computer had nearly 75% of the hdd filled up with games and other space hogs. All of the important files I had are backed up on a slave 80 GB hard drive but would easily fit burned onto a DVD. I'm planning on burning the files to a dvd and using the 80 GB drive in the linux machine (as it's only using about 20 GB worth of space on the 200 GB drive) and putting the 200 gb drive in the windows machine.

I want to move the current linux installation from the 200 gb drive to the 80. I want everything on there to be the same since I spent a lot of time configuring it how I wanted (thank you google!) and honestly I don't want to redo it all. I'm still new to linux and have had lots of help from friends and forums in setting it up the way I have it now and would hate to have to go back and do it all over again.

Now that I've given you all this useless information, on to my questions. From what I have read on this forum, it sounds like the best thing for me to do would be to create the partition, then use cp for the directoried inside. I have tried doing this and it doesn't seem to be copying all of the files. Is there a different alternative to this?

Thank you for your help.

This has been covered many times before. Here's a thread I contributed to some time ago, and seems to have helped quite a lot of people:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...postid=1202369

Also, at the end of this page you'll see a "Similar threads" list, which should also be helpful to you.

If you do not delete/remove anything from your running linux drive until you are sure you can boot from the new one, you'll be OK. If you run into problems, you can always come back here. Moving a linux installation from windows & linux on one disk to linux only on another was one of my first steps with linux, and it taught me a load of stuff that was useful later.

Have fun.