Hi.

Another option to using a linux live CD, which will also allow resizing of the drive in the process, is Acronis True Image. Admittedly you have to buy it, but it's not all that expensive, and is a very good backup solution as well.

It has a facility to produce a bootable recovery cd (which is almost certainly based on linux, amusingly) which allows drives to be cloned, amongst other things.

IDE CD/DVD drives are certainly still available, although the range is steadily shrinking. Also, you can get SATA to IDE converters that will allow a SATA device to be used on an IDE port. I have had odd results with some motherboards using these in the past, because of weird BIOS incompatibilities, but if this happens using a 40-way cable rather than an 80-way one seems to cure it, albeit at the cost of slowing things down.

pca