JReese,

Welcome to Justlinux!

and

Happy New Year.

We need to know your partitioning scheme become able to comment on what you are doing. You can be assured that cloning the hard disk cannot possibly alter your operating system.

The best information on your hard disk is obtainable in a root Linux terminal using command
Code:
sudo fdisk -l
or
Code:
fdisk -l
if you are logged in as a root user (equivalent to admin in MS Windows).

The Fixboot and fixmbr are only needed if you have Linux occupying the boot sector and MBR repectively but want to revert back to the equivalent in MS Windows.

I would strongly recommend using only one partitioning tools and stay away from the PowerQuest's Partition Magic. It is known as Partition Tragic and spread out hard disk corruptions because PowerQuest does not understand partitions other than MS systems.

Linux on the other hand supports 100+ partition types. Partition Tragic can report a healthy hard disk with errors in the partition table. If you allow it to alter it then you could suffer hard disk corruption. I would say about 20 to 30% hard disk problems reported in various forums are courtesy of Partition Tragic. You can run it but don't take up its advices if you run non-MS partitions.

If your partitions are reported by the disk management then they are healthy. MS is the first operating system to abandon a hard disk if it has an error in the partition table. Linux is the last one to do the same. So Linux is a much better tool and utility when it comes to salvage and save information in a hard disk.

After you clone the 160Gb into the 320Gb there should be 160Gb unallocated space. This space can be turn into partition "only" if you have not used up all the 4 primary partitions. If you have used up all 4 primaries then you need to reorganise the hard disk.

You can put any number of Xp copies (assuming from the same license or different licenses) in a hard disk but you can only run one copy at a time and hide the rest.

I have run 126 copies of Xp in a 1TB hard disk before! You can run a BAT file in Dos to control the booting or use a script file in Linux. The latter is easier. If you have less than 6 MS systems then Grub is totally capable of booting them for you as Grub can hide and unhide partitions.