New hard drive

Newegg had some cheap 250gb sata hard disks, so I picked one up to replace my 80gb pata disk. The old 80gb drive housed my Windows XP partition, mainly because my install disk couldn't recognize my other sata disk and I didn't have a driver floppy to feed it.
I'm not the sort that re-installs Windows every six months, or whatever other relatively frequent interval those so-called technical sorts nuke, so I proceeded to find out how I could clone it.

I'm going to chase this rabbit for just a moment.
Why do so many 'high-proficiency' PC users re-install Windows at frequent intervals? When I installed Windows XP, I'd been running Windows98 for more than four years. This install of XP is almost past its third birthday and it still runs like a champ. I'll grant that I've had to manually defragment once (this isn't as complex as it might sound, just moving files from disk to disk really), but minute for minute, it's easier and faster than re-installing. The most common excuse I hear for re-installing is, "Oh I just do so much, the thing gets bogged down." I try nearly every new game or open source project I find, not to mention I have development software and libraries for a dozen languages and I never seem to have this necessity. I don't fancy that I do anything special to keep things running either, if anything my PC and both its resident OS' could file domestic battery claims based on my rigorous computing habits, but alas, I digress.

A quick search revealed a nice package of Linux tools for dealing with NTFS and the specific process I was looking for was reasonably well documented at
http://alma.ch/blogs/bahut/2005/04/cloning-xp-with-linux-and-ntfsclone.html

I'm pleased to see how far NTFS support has come in Linux. Don't forget that this crap has to be reverse engineered since some people apparently never learned how to play nice as children.
For those using Ubuntu or it's relatives, you can likely fetch these tools with 'apt-get install ntfsprogs'.

Oh yeah, First Post!