low level disk partition (NTFS) backup and restore

[Jesse Guardiani]

Howdy list,

I've got a slight problem that I'm not sure how to solve, but I'm
fairly sure FreeBSD is capable of helping me solve. Here's the
situation:

I have an IBM Thinkpad A30p with a 40Gb HDD. This drive contains
a 10 Gb NTFS partition holding Windows XP and a 30 Gb partition
holding FreeBSD 5.2-RC1.

Also, I have a desktop machine at home running Windows 98 SE on a
20 Gb hard disk. Now, as many of you know, Win 98 SE isn't a very
nice Operating System. I'd _love_ to put FreeBSD on that computer,
but unfortunately I can't. My wife is going to school and may need
MS Office someday soon. And I own an external Backpack CDRW parallel
drive that isn't support by FreeBSD (and Linux is out of the question).

So, what I want to do is copy the 10 Gb NTFS partition from my laptop
to the Win 98 SE computer's hard disk drive. I don't use Win XP on my
laptop much, so I'll delete it once I can verify that it's successfully
installed on the Win 98 SE machine.

I've scoured the internet, and so far I can't find a way to do this
from Windows (wow, big surprise). Win XP's "ntbackup" utility doesn't
provide any way to restore on a non Win XP machine, AFAICT. Is there
some way I can do this using tools like 'dd' and gzip?

Here are the things I'd like to accomplish:

1.) Low level (including MBR, if possible) compressed copy of my
    NTFS partition to external USB 30 Gb hard drive.

2.) Boot FreeBSD Fixit media CDROM on Win 98 SE computer. Mount external
    USB drive containing compressed copy of NTFS partition.

3.) Decompress and write NTFS partition from external USB drive to Win 98 SE
    computer's hard disk drive.

4.) Run some kind of partitioning tool (BootItNG?) to make sure the (former)
    Win 98 SE machine's partition tables are correct.

Does this sound do-able? What commands would I use to backup and restore
the NTFS partition?

Thanks!

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
WingNET Internet Services,
P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605
423-559-LINK (v)  423-559-5145 (f)
http://www.wingnet.net