Hello,

Not a problem, but a top tip. This week, I just bought a new hard
drive for my old Dell PIII laptop, which I use as a DVR among other
things. The question was how to copy the contents of the old drive to
the new drive. I had backed it up. But my copy of WinXP didn't include
service pack II. It was taking a long time to update, even over a
relatively quick broadband connection. And then I was facing the
prospects of installing my backup software and restoring. I could buy
Norton Ghost, but that's pretty expensive. And I wasn't convinced that
it would work.

However, with a search for "open-source ghost", I found g4u, or Ghost
for Unix.

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

I downloaded the 3.1MB disk image, burned it to a CD and booted up my
laptop. I put the old drive in a USB 2.0 case, and voila, in 30
minutes, g4u cloned my old drive to my new one, operating systems and
all. Just remember the command is copydisk (old disk) (new disk). It's
not got shiny graphical user face, but it's pretty user friendly and
walks you through the process. It reminds me how powerful command line
software can be without the pretty interface.

I'm planning on sending the German coder some money via PayPal. It's
the best software for this kind of thing I've found.

Hope that helps someone the next time they have to install a new hard
drive.

best,
Kevin