http://www.cpqlinux.com/tar.html will help you.

Hee, Microlinux,

Tell me: 'Why do you want to back-up y're / anyway?'
Don't you have an XP-Install-CD?
Don't you have the drivers belonging to the laptop?

Or you donot have the Debian-installer?

Tell me, what is that interresting in your /, that you want to make a back-up from it?

Must be a very special version, very rare, or what?

Ah, now I know!

You want to spend a lot of time to establish something, which can be done quicker!
Yes, that must be it, no?

it just takes a long time to get all the setting back to the way they were. Also, if I've got a way to set my system back to the way it was, it saves a lot of bandwithdth later on. Just convenience really. I'll see if I can contact the IT guy at my old school, he helped me mirror a drive one time, so I may be able to do something similar here. Does anyone else know?

Ah, its the bandwidth, that worries you?
You do not have ADSL or TL?

Well, that's fair enough.

The things you want are surely possible...

Only breakpoint is where to leave the data to back-up.

Some place back in this thread of yours, is spoken of the way to segment the back-up to more than one DVD or CD's, and putting all together, 'assemble' afterwards..

Do you posess a Burner?
Or can you borrough one?

Another possibility is to use a friends spare drive to put the data on, throw away the partitions, format, repartition, format the new partitions,and put the data back.

How big would the tarred / be? I've got a spare drive laying around(20GB), so I should be able to tar it to that right? I've got DSL, it's just a hassle. Like I said before, this seems to be the route with the least reconfiguring. I'll go back and look for the disassemble/reassemble method, however, if there is a way to do it w/out disassembling it...that would preferable

The hdd you are using now is 30GB.
Do you happen to know how much is actualy used on the drive you are using now?
It might be possible, to back-up your total install, windows and all, to the 20GB hdd.
But that is dependable on what is on the disk.
MP3 and movies do not pack much, at best 2 or 3%...

Most of my drive is taken up by my windows install, and coresponding FAT32(windows/linux swap space). I've got 10 GB set up for a linux install(debian, and the other half was gonig to be used LFS. I only need to back up the debian install, then I'll reset the partitions, and copy the debian install back to the one 10GB partition.

Well, than there won't be much of a problem, room enough!
I wish you luck.....
Let us know when y're done?
And how it went?

judging from here
I'd need to run
to backup my root
and
Is this right? Or did I mis-read the posted link?

Did you check the mount?
Is your second hdd visible and accessable?
You can give it a try, but if you are unshure, you can ask awesome machine about this, he says he maintains the thread....

I haven't tried it yet, I dont' wanna mess something up. I'd like to be sure that's what I need to do.

wait, could I just mount the 20GB drive on NFS, and just do a
Would this work? It'd copy the directory structure to the other drive, allowing me to reformat everything, and then copy it back via knoppix, right?

This could work, but I would first check the accessability by just copying something.
If that works, I would try your suggestion.
If everything is copied, I would verify.
After being assured, I would delete my other drive.

what do you mean by check accessability? like to the NFS drive? how would you verify? Like, how can you be sure that everything is on there?