hard disk image transfer

[Kent Frazier]

I have only very basic experience with parted, so I can't really
advise you on that.  I would, however, suggest that you do the copying
after booting from a Live CD with the necessary tools (Knoppix has
them I believe, maybe the Ubuntu Live CD as well, or the
SystemRescueCD.)

The reason for this, and this is from experience, is that you don't
want to have the filesystem you are copying to be mounted at the time.
 This can caused issues due to unsynchronized data, and things like
the proc and dev filesystems, which are not "real" files: they just
exist while the system is running as an interface to your hardware and
processes.

Beyond that, it should be a pretty simple procedure.

You may be able to copy the partitions outright, but if you wanted to
resize some of them and make them bigger, you may want to just create
the larger partition and then copy everything over to the new
partition with 'cp -a' or 'tar'.  The only difficulty with this is
that you won't be able to do this with an NTFS partition.  It is also
possible to copy the partition over and then resize it (which you may
have to do with the NTFS partition), but my experience with that is
that it is not that simple.  It involves using a resizing tool for the
filesystem (ntfsresize, et al.), and then deleting and recreating the
partition with the new size in fdisk.  If you make a mistake here, it
can screw up your data, so I think the former way is safer.

Good luck.

Kent