[newbie] backup/restore/repartitioning

[Asa Rossoff]

I have a situation where (1) my partition table is screwed up, and (2) I 
have been wanting to resize my partitions anyway... file access seems to 
be working, but all the partition tools complain about errors, and 
cfdisk gives a fatal error and won't even run.  I'm pretty sure that 
diskdrake (in Mandrake 9.2) caused the corruption to the table, when I 
used it to choose a new swap partition and delete the old swap partition.

All my mandrake partitions contain a total of 1.75 GB data, and I am 
thinking of just backing everything up, perhaps tar and gzip? to my 
windows partition (on a seperate harddrive), and then completely 
repartioning the Linux drive, and then restore the data.  My Windows 
partition only has 1.4 GB free, so I am hoping that the Linux data will 
compress down to fit in that space... otherwise, I can compress some 
other data on the Windows partition to make room.

I'm looking for guidance in how to go about this, and then get a working 
setup again.  My only bootable Linux media I have besides the harddrive 
is the Mandrake install CD, and a floppy with my Lilo boot sector on it 
so I can boot the HD if the HD's LILO gets screwed up.

I haven't figured out yet how to make a boot floppy under Mandrake, 
since the kernel image is large... I understand you have to use special 
tools to format a super capacity floppy.

So what process would you recommend I take?  What do I need to have 
prepared before I wip out the HD?  What commands to backup/restore?

Thanks :)
Asa
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