[gentoo-user] Seeking advice about backup and partitioning; preparing to dual-boot Linux onto Vista drive

[Kevin O'Gorman]

Dude, I'm getting a Dell!

It's gonna come with Vista, and I have to use it that way for work.
But I want to
put a Linux partition on there.  So I need to repartition.

Having learned to be cautious, I'm wondering if there is a good open-source way
to back up about 300GB of NTFS such that I can restore fairly smoothly.  It has
to be fairly fast, so file-by-file copies are probably going to suck.
I'll have 100MB
ethernet to a big-enough drive.

Then, I'm wondering about partitioning tools.  I can use
PartitionMagic 7.0.  I've heard
of gparted, but not used it.  Any advice?

TIA

++ kevin


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD