copy hard drive to disk image

[Urza9814]

Ok, so currently my computer partitions are as follows:

200GB DRIVE:

10GB Win98

10GB WinXP

80GB Win Shared

40GB /

53GB /home

a few GB swap (or something like that)

 

30GB DRIVE:

20GB empty NTFS partition (It was used before...)

10GB /Backup (just created for, yup, you guessed it, backups of some important files)

 

But see...WinXP hasn't worked in a month or two, and I don't really need it. It's nice for those rare occasions when I wanna play a game or something, but I have my mom's computer down the hall on XP for anything critical, and after getting QEMU and finding the original Red Alert runs almost perfectly on that, there's not much use for XP. Win98 I've only ever booted in to from QEMU on Linux in the past year or so...so I was thinking of just giving the whole 200GB drive to Linux, and the 30GB drive to WinXP. I figure I can create a .img file of my Win98 partition, and just store that on my Linux drive for QEMU. But I don't know how to do that. Any help?

 

Hmm...also just had a though...perhaps I should leave WinXP on the 200GB drive and use the 30GB for 98 on QEMU? Would it maybe run faster on separate drives, or is it pretty much QEMU that's gonna slow it down? (I use the accelerator package). I don't really wanna have to re-install Win98 though to move it....the installer makes me nervous because of the way it doesn't really choose partitions, so if that'd help is there a way I could just copy the existing 98 partition and resize? I don't need it actually be bootable from lilo, only QEMU. It won't boot on my computer anyways because I have too much RAM and I'm too lazy to install the patch.

Edited September 23, 2006 by Urza9814