hi, The best way to do this is the following: create an ext2-filesystem on the enw drive using mke2fs mount it under say /mnt then do find / -mount | cpio -rp /mnt/ This is going by memroy. You do best readingthe find(1) and cpio(1) manpages before proceding. I used this combination some time ago to move my root-partition around between 2 places about 5 times in one day ;) Note that I'm asuming that your old hard-drive contains only a single partition. If this is not the case, you probably want to do this for every single partition you need to copy. success -- slainte mhaith (good health), slainte (cheers) Uisce Beatha (water of live/health) ----------- Andor Demarteau E-mail: ademarte@students.cs.uu.nl student computer science www: http://www.students.cs.uu.nl/~ademarte/ Utrecht University irc: see webpage for details ----------- Believe in yourself, know what you want, and make it happen!