New Hatachi 80gig drive and dual boot question

[richp]

I just ordered a 80gig hatachi travelstar for my T30. The OEM drive has the 40gig drive with the two partitions, the pre_load 35.62 NTFS and the 1.64 fat ibm_service. I want to clone the drive as is using the 40gig I have and want to use the other 40gig for a linux, fedora core6 or 7. What I don't want to do is loose that ibm_service partion.
Any shortfalls, tips, etc, I've done dualboots before but from fresh installs of XP and linux, solaris, etc where I have not worried about a recover patition, I'm mostly courious how grub is going to handle it.

[Harryc]

Do you have a drive to backup the original image to? Use the free trial version of acronis true image and it will do what you want.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/do ... trueimage/

[Timoti]

Cloning partitions in linux is fairly easy. I would do the following partitioning:

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/dev/hda1 : ibm recovery partiton - fat
/dev/hda2 : winxp - ntfs (clone from original with ntfsclone)
/dev/hda3 : linux - ext3 <bootable>
/dev/hda4 : linux - swap

Install GRUB in the MBR with the /boot folder on hda3, and it should be fine. I'm doing the same, just without the ibm recovery partition.

Backing up the IBM partition can be handy:

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dd if=/dev/hda bs=1M | bzip2 > /home/user/ibm.fat.image.raw

All the tools you need (ntfsclone, dd, fdisk) can be found on most linux rescue cd's (trinity, sysresccd, etc.). If you can network it with a desktop, you can save the images on it using ssh.