OK, here is the summary: I needed to replace the HDD of a non-linux laptop with a bigger one, without a need to reinstall everything. I had no working linux machine in place as well. My only possibility was to somehow backup the NTFS partition on a windows server. So, the staring point was obvious - Knoppix and samba share to a win box. Now, the first attempt was using just a plain: dd if=/dev/hda of=/myshare/myimage.img This failed! The number one reason is, that in order to use dd to write to remote machine, I needed to use smbmount. And there is a nasty limitation on the filesize - 2GB. After a lot of googling, the only thing I found was in some RedHat lists, and there they say that this is a problem with the smbmount on 2.4 kernels. Looks like this continues to be a problem, or at least I couldn't find a solution, as Knoppix 3.9 runs on 2.6 kernel. The second problem was that this copies the whole partition, with all empty space, which produces a lot of unnecessary traffic. I played a little bit with dd skip, etc in order to create smaller than 2GB files, but ... you know, 40GB hard drive will take 20 images ... boring and not right I guess. So, the solution was, as per Silviu Marin-Caea's and Mike McMullin's advice, I tried partimage. I did not used a server part for this. Just mounted the samba share, instructed partimage to create 2GB chunks, and of course to gzip the backup. After the partition backup, i did: dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.img bs=512 count=1 to backup the MBR. Then inserted the new HDD, and restored the MBR with dd if=mbr.img of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 This as well restores the partition table. Now, the problem was that partimage failed to restore. It segfaulted using the user interface, and using the command line complained that the target partition is 0 size and can not continue. I rebooted the machine, and now everything worked fine. I would really like to know what I needed to do in order to refresh the partition table without rebooting, but I couldn't find any info about this. Anyway ... I'm done. Memtest from SuSE install DVD is running (I added a new memory), and tomorrow I'll be all set with a new lappy (I hope :) ) Cheers and thanks for all the help Sunny