You may want to look into the technique discussed here, which lets you boot from a compressed image stored in the NTFS filesystem, without repartitioning. I have no experience with it, but apparantly people are having much luck. That said, if you do plan on repartitioning your hdd, you should definitely defrag any hdd you plan to change before you start the install. Under XP, the tool is Start->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter. This should move your data to the beginning of the disk, physically, and help ensure that parted doesn't damage any files. I've never actually used Knoppix's partition editor (I had partitions all set up from the Fedora Core 2 install I replaced) so I can't speak to that, but I'm sure someone else can answer questions there.[/url]