If you like to toy with different operating systems as much as I do then you have no doubt encountered the problem of running out of space on a disk which started out as 'test' install. Here's the scenario, you hear about some new flavour of Linux and decide to give it a try, you dig some old 20GB hard drive out from the cupboard, you hook it up as a slave and run the install so you can dual boot and begin to have a play.

Over the course of the next few weeks you figure out all of the hardware and software niggles by installing packages and performing some configuration until you've got everything just right. Then one day down the line, you decide that you now prefer this operating system to whatever you're using right now and want to make a complete switch, but the problem is that the operating system along with all of your packages and fine tuning are sat on a 20GB hard drive which can't even hold your music collection, never mind the other 80GB of data you wish to move over.

For me the thought of reinstalling an operating system along with all the package downloads, installs and configuration that goes along with that a second time just doesn't appeal to me. Luckily there is an easier way, and that way is cloning. Cloning allows you to make a complete bit for bit copy of your hard-drive, partitions, GRUB and all.

For Linux the process is particularly easy, simply download G4L (Ghost 4 Linux) which can be found here – www.sourceforge.net/projects/g4l . G4L is a boot disk, to use is all you need to do is to have your source drive (the drive you wish to clone) and your target drive (the drive where the clone will be stored) attached to the same machine, then boot to the disk and type 'g4l' on the command line. You can then use the self explanatory 'Click & Clone' GUI to make a complete copy of the drive, this process can take several hours or more depending on the size and speed of your drives. Once the process is complete you will have a new drive which is an exact copy of the source drive, which you now should be able to plug straight in a boot to.

Once you have made the clone and booted to it, you might be surprised to see that the system is telling you that your new disk size is the same as the old smaller drive. This happens as because the clone is a complete bit for bit copy, this means it also cloned the size of the disk partitions. To fix this you need to increase the size of the partitions, this can be achieved by using the Gparted boot disk which can be downloaded here – www.gparted.sourceforge.net . Simply boot to the disk and using the straight forward GUI copy the small partition into the unused space, then delete the small partition. You can then extend the size of this new partition to fill all of the space available in your drive.

There you have it, a complete copy of your old system and now a lot more disk space to play with!

For full documentation on how to use G4L or GParted check out the documentation on their respective websites. Although I have never tried it, I believe that if you are looking to do something similar on a Windows machine, you can use Norton Ghost to perform the clone and then plug in the new cloned drive as a slave to another Windows machine and use XP's built in disk manager to extend the size of the partition.