I have a three year old Toshiba laptop that boots both MS WindowsXP Home and Kubuntu, but I want to downgrade it to a Windows-only system. I would like to backup the disk image to an external USB hard drive (no problem using dd), but I'm very afraid of extending the current Windows partition using qtparted or gparted and not being able to restore my Windows partition if it fails. (If I remember, dd would require me to restore the Windows partition EXACTLY to size.)

Can someone point me to a specific set of instructions? Has anyone used qtparted or gparted to extend their working Windows partition successfully? (If I lose the ability to use the windows configuration I have, I will lose a client. The software for the client's stuff is on this partition and I will not be able to re-install it. I want to extend the ntfs partition because I need more space for the data files.)

I really like having both LINUX and Windows on this system, and I have cygwin installed on the WXP, but cygwin is not totally satisfactory. (Neither is the Apache2triad installation I have on that partition, but I need a local Apache server for testing my Web development.) I think I'd be better off removing cygwin and using an embedded version of DSL or using Puppy when I need Linux capabilities.

Any feedback will be appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike B.