Software :: Imaging Hard Drives - Gparted To Resize The Newly Imaged Disk Accordingly

The problem is every forum I read pretty much ends up with someone suggesting DD, everyone agreeing and the threads dead-end. This is not a good solution for real world large scale usage which is what I'm trying to do. At least it doesn't appear to be unless there is some switch I have misinterpreted when invoking the command. The problem I have with it is it's super bloated and god awful slow. It tries to write out the entire partition or set of partitions (based on the choice I have made) reguardless of if any of the space had been empty, and lets say the partition I copied from was 80 GB and I copy it to a 160 GB disk/partition... I am left with an 80 GB partition and 80 GB unused space and a need to use another tool such as Gparted to resize the newly imaged disk accordingly.

Right now what I use is Norton Ghost and it can do the job I need in only a couple minutes instead of a couple hours and it sizes the partition to max size all at once. I do not want to use this program tho... The fact is in order to make ghost run at a usable speed I have to use it's Windows and not its DOS version which leaves me using something like BartPE and... that's worse than using Windows ME. Surely someone out there has noticed this is a problem and developed a better program that can at least run on par with Ghost.

why I was hoping for a Linux solution it's because I would like to use a "one stop shop" disk, so to speak, where I can boot into a small linux distro such as Puppy and have a full suite at my disposal rather than booting with one disk, wiping, rebooting with another disk, ghosting then testing everything. I suppose if anyone knows of a distro that can already do all that including a good ghost alternative already packaged I would love that.