Ho 25F! That sounds neat. Obviously a better solution, though it has been instructive to think about other possibilities. I checked the Knoppix site last night and it seems pretty interesting. I'll follow your advice & look at it. Thanks for the tip!

Now all FBW has to do is to learn a few temporary rudiments of Linux... Akcherly I'm sure one could compile a stripped-to-the-bones kernel with not much more than Samba and a shell script to do the job that just might fit of a floppy or two. AFAIK the files won't care what sized partition they're on or whether it's FAT or FAT32 so long as they get there and are correctly entered in the table?

For the non-hacker to do the required unusual operation with the least tears then from what I can gather Ghost (or the 30 quid) would be the answer. I hope FBW will tell us what he eventually did!

On second thoughts a secto-to-sector copy of a partition to a larger partition is unlikely to work with a FAT-based filesystem - the File Allocation Table is going to be the wrong size. So you need to make the filesystem first. (Format, in DOS-speak). Then when it comes to copying files I would not trust M$ not to have "optimised" something somewhere so that it expects to find exactly as they were, so I'd only be happy if the short and long filenames and all other attributes were preserved.

FWIW, www.acronis.com is yet another option for disk management tools.

Thanks everyone for your advice.

The new computer (Dell Latitude X200) has a file transfer wizard; the instructions are very straightforward. Copy the relevant file and settings transfer program to a floppy, feed it to the old computer (Dell Latitude LT), connect the two together with a £20 serial file transfer cable and then watch the little dears merrily chatter away to eachother.

One snag - it took ages! I only wanted to transfer 350Mb of data from the folder I'd already prepared in 'My documents' - the transfer process took 16, yes, sixteen hours to complete!

:8 New project

Having read some very interesting posts from Mac the knife, 25 etc and others I have decided to have some fun/torture with Linux on P2
Thanks to all those who were able to offer the usual helpful and friendly advice
Regards
FBW

Nearly forgot......BOAC instead of having a cheap shot at me on a public forum you can Email me direct....otherwise SHUT UP...nuff said?

Beags - a serial DCC at the maximal 115200 baud (COM port with a FIFO-buffering 16550A) works out at a theoretical 9-10Kb/sec or about 36Mb/hr, so 16 hours for 350Mb of data sounds about right. Yawn....glad it worked anyway.

Using the parallel printer port for the DCC-connection allows a much higher transfer rate, with a Basic 4 bit "LapLink type" should be around 60-80 Kb/sec. With a "DirectParallel® Universal Fast Cable" supposedly 300-600 Kb/sec. An Ethernet 10 MBit connection through-put is approx. 300 Kb/sec, so 30-150 times faster than a serial connection.

Well FBW - you are consistent. I don't think I am alone in thinking a 'public' apology would be in order. It was not a 'cheap shot' . You chose a 'public forum'. I could list those you have 'rattled' but there is no need. They all started out assuming a certain level of knowledge from your post and answered appropriately. That assumption proved to be wrong - their fault? Let me quote TINSTAAFL - just ONE of our invaluable contributors "Carping at people who are trying to help doesn't do you any favours, FBW. It makes us all think twice about even trying to help you. I know I hummed & ha-ed over responding..."



Beags - as Newswatcher and I said - Laplink is ok for what you want. It supports parallell connections which are 'n' faster than serial.

If I'd known quite how long it was going to take, I might have used another method! But it's done now - and it had the advantage of keeping me off the Internet for 16 hours+ !

Now, what do I do with this nice new DCC cable?