How to repartition and backup in XP? Please help.

[Clockface]

My laptop snuffed it, so I've bought another one, this time running XP (as opposed to Win98). Anyway, when I bought the old one, it's hard drive (FAT 32) was all one partition, so I repartitioned it with Partition Magic (I think) so that the OS was all on the C: partition, and the rest of the drive (the majority, I think 16GB to the C: drive's 4GB) was given over to the D: partition.

Then I used Ghost to create an image file of the C: drive, onto drive D:, which I then networked to my desktop PC to save to disc, in case the C: drive ever became corrupted, in which case I could un-Ghost the image file back onto the C: drive.

Now I want to do the same again, to the new laptop, but the laptop's hard-drive is NTFS formatted, so what tools should I use to:

a) re-partition a NTFS drive into two or more partitions, without losing the data on the hard drive, of course (other wise I'd just repartition and format and re-install XP, but I want to keep the current installation)

and

b) create a back up image of the NTFS c: drive?

And if I need to boot up in DOS to use either of the tools, what boot disc (perferably CD) will boot up in DOS and recognise NTFS partitions?

Thanks for any answers.

[K0LO]

For repartitioning you can use PartitionMagic or gparted (free).

If you want a fully-featured imaging program (not free but worth every penny) then take a look atAcronis True Image. Their companion program, Acronis Disk Director, also has a bootable version on CD that will let you repartition, do low-level sector editing, view AND edit files in NTFS, FAT, ext2 or ext3 format. These two tools are my current favorites.

[Giovanni]

I would recommend Acronis products over Partion Magic myself, I didn't have good experiences with PM. Though it is supposed to work with Linux partitions, it ended up telling me that my Linux partitions were 100% full when I knew they were not.

Now granted you aren't working with Linux in this case, however such a huge bug makes me worrisome that the program isn't as reliable as it should be.

Also note that XP does not have DOS. Windows 2000, NT, and XP gave DOS the boot, which caused Windows to become far more stable. It is possible to run DOS applications and XP does have a command line interface, but it is no longer possible to boot into DOS as true DOS no longer exists.

[Clockface]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll try GParted for the partitioning. It turns out Ghost does handle XP (aparently...) so I'll probably stick with that.

Thanks again.