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Doug McGarrett <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> 09/14/05 9:36 PM >>> I have 2 hard drives and the XP drive is getting flakey, altho it booted today. Is there any way to copy the _complete_ xp drive, registry, files, and all to the Linux drive, and then, having replaced the flakey drive, copy all of that back, and have a bootable, usable xp system? If so, please give me detailed directions. I'm an RF guy, not a computer maven.

BTW, the flakey drive contains the dual-boot system, and I could not get into that last night. Can I get into the Linux drive directly somehow, from a floppy or a CD or something?

TIA!--doug

Last one first, yes if you use a SuSE install CD or DVD you can boot to a 'recovery' (is that the right word?) prompt and access the hard disks directly from a console. Your best bet to get the whole XP partition would be to image it using the dd tool, which is installed by default on SuSE linux. I found a thread with a couple of examples, which may help, at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/350016 You basically boot into linux, mount your XP partition (if it's not set to auto mount) then run something like: dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/home/user/windowsxp.img which would mirror the 1st partition (the 1 in hda1) on the 1st IDE hard disk (hda; the 2nd hard disk would be hdb) and create the image on /home/user/windowsxp.img Maybe someone has a better idea though? SteveC