I'm getting a new hard drive tomorrow and have all kinds of swapping to do to get everything where I want it. I'm a bit confused though and was hoping to get some help.
What I have now: 2 80gb hard drives in my desktop, one with Windows XP and one with Ubuntu. The drive with Ubuntu has a partition mapped to /home. I also have a router running dd-wrt with a 500gb external 500gb drive attached.
What I'd like to do is take the 500gb drive out of the external enclosure and replace the 2 80gb drives in my desktop. And rather than having a Windows and Ubuntu partition, I want to just boot Windows and run Ubuntu in a VM with VMware. I'll use the Ubuntu VM most of the time and when I want Windows just tab out of it. Is that reasonable? Then I'll put the new 1.5tb drive in the external enclosure.
So I guess here is where I'm at. I don't mind reinstalling Windows, and don't mind reinstalling Ubuntu (which I'd need to do anyway to get it in a VM). Can I point the VM installation of Ubuntu to a partition that has my /home or will I need to copy that in to the VM?
The part I really don't know is how I can get everything moved from one drive to another. I know every time I've tried to just straight copy my home directory to a new location, it fails for one reason or another (files in use, permissions maybe, whatever) whether or not I'm running the copy of Ubuntu using that directory. Do I just create an image of the partition, put it somewhere and then resize it?