I'm at the end of my shagging tether with this. I'm tying to shift a 55 odd gig partiton (sda1) on to a 20 odd gig disk (hda1). here's my MO... boot gparted - shrink the huge partition sda1 (source) down to the size of hda1 (dest - the 20 ish gig drive) dd the mofo over, sort booting out later. Simple right? Not for yours truely :-( Snag is that # of cylinders on the disks differ. Using gparted to shrink sda1 to the size of hda1 doeseny work. Having seen a jolly good (widely aclaimed) post here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=362506&page=2 I thought great, I can do the math(s) with different cylinders and change the size of both sda1 and hda1 so they end up the same then dd is my friend. Nothing doing, according to yon post, my disk (hda) should be 40017915 sectors BUT fdisk say it's actually 40021632. (using ths same maths I get my sda to be 117210240 and fdisk concurrs so I know the calculation is correct) $ banner Help!!! Does anyone have any experience with this? In desperation I'm trying dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda bs=4096 and let uncle Bill (yup I'm cloning an NTFS partition) try and pick up the pieces! PS this is written with the assistance of 1.5 bottles of red so cut me some slack if it's a load of old Rolex Ta Chris