Hi:

Having just spent a week restoring Windows XP on my laptop, I have come to Knoppix.net to learn how to be able to do it better next time (without any help from Microsoft who will have stopped supporting XP by then). I have lots of old software that I fear may not run under W7 so I want to keep this old laptop going for ever.

Can I describe what I think I need to do and maybe someone out there can tell me if I have it right, or if it won't work and there's a better way.

My plan is to buy a USB drive big enough to take the entire C: drive (hda2), make an NTFS partition on it (sda1) which is big enough to take it (I can do that in Windows I think), then reboot into Knoppix, mount the two drives and do the command:

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/mnt/sda1

If I have understand correctly, that will give me a byte-for-byte clone of the C: drive on the USB drive. Back in Windows I should be able to read/restore individual files from this. If (when?) Windows crashes, I should be able to boot into the Knoppix CD and mount sda1 and then ....

At this point I am not sure what to do about mounting hda2. The plan is to execute the "dd" command again but with if=/dev/sda1 and of=/mnt/hda2 but I can't figure out if hda2 needs to be formatted first, and if so, how. The dd command is doing a byte-for-byte copy so it shouldn't need to know how to write in the NTFS environment, but I can't figure out whether I need to format the partition first, and if so, whether it even matters what type of filing system I choose for the formatting.

The thing that worries me is that I have been told that operating systems other than Windows may have difficulty writing to NTFS partitions (because NTFS is poorly documented?). If I have got it right, using "dd" for the backup AND for the restore gets round this. If I need to restore XP and the hard disk is corrupt, I am not sure I know how to proceed if Knoppix must format the Windows partition as an NTFS filesystem and this is not easy.

Maybe some of you reading this can tell me if I am worrying too much. Is all this written-down somewhere?

Thanks
Peter