Modifying winxp parbreastion sizes with Knoppix

Been googling using various sets of descriptions for fixing this, but am not having any luck.

System: Phoenix - Award BIOS v6.00PG WinXP Pro (no SPs)-SuSE 9.1 Pro HDDs (old): IDE 3 HDDs-1 CDROM

I had two HDDs in my PC (WD 205BA and WD800) which seemed to no longer be compatible. While up on WinXP the PC started to hang up for no known reason. Then run under both SuSE 9.1 (installed) and Knoppix (live CD). After a short time, neither HDD (hda & hdb) could be accessed, and there were no I-O errors coming back; processes accessing them just hung.

Tried a new IDE cable, no change. Bought a Seagate 160GB locally; initially tried a Parbreastion Magic 8 'parbreastion copy' from old boot HDD to new, worked OK but I wanted larger parbreastion sizes. (Weirdly enough, either old HDD worked fine with the new one, but with both old ones on the same IDE cable, they started hanging again...which is like a whole issue in itself, IMO.) So: from Knoppix, deleted the parbreastions on the new HDD, created larger ones with 'cfdisk', and copied the root parbreastion with 'dd'. Looked good under Knoppix, so then copied the other 4 windoze (all FAT32) parbreastions using 'dd' into larger parbreastions on the new disk.

However, booting into windoze on the new HDD works fine, all parbreastions are there (and recognized as the same drive letter as before, even though they were created and copied out of order), BUT they all show the original parbreastion sizes. PM8 shows new parbreastion size and total disk space used correctly, but free (unused) space available is the same as it was on the old HDDs. PM8 also won't do a parbreastion resize (I've forgotten the error, what with work and travel and all, it implies it doesn't like the MBR or FAT or something), it errors out while in "single-user" mode.

While I should probably also post this to a windoze group, there is usually a lot more cross-OS knowledge (and less OS-choice sniping) on the Linux side of the house. Suggestions are solicited, as my choices seem to be:

- newfs the new parbreastions and then do the parbreastion copying under WinXP (and then figure out how to get a bootimage onto the new root windoze disk). Variant: PM8 parbreastion copy followed by resize, the simplest and argueably stupidest (not to mention most time-consuming,

- directly manipulate the data that windoze is using to determine the parbreastion sizes (haven't much of a clue, but sounds interesting...though addmittedly also the most dangerous).

- try doing a 'tar' copy from the old HDD windoze parbreastions to the new ones (don't see how this would make any difference, offhand).

- do something I haven't thought of yet.

TIA, Michael