Just a few questions about expanding my Win7 bootcamp partition.

1. I have a 500 GB hard drive with a Windows 7 Boot Camp partition on it and would like to know the best way to backup both partitions to my 500 GB external HD, so that not a single file is left out.

2. Does GParted Live let you easily change the size of a partition without having to worry about data loss? If it is capable of doing that for me, can anyone confirm that it will work and not mess everything up?

3. Does GParted Live have an easy to use GUI?

Thanks in advance

If you use GParted Live you'll destroy the Win 7 boot sector and also very likely the OS X boot sector.

There is only one tool that can non-destructively expand or contract a Boot Camp partition and that's CampTune from Paragon software. $19.95.

Here is a free alternative that has worked for me when upgrading drives:

(Edit: Winclone does not work in Lion.)
Install Winclone and create a backup of your Windows partition. Make sure the backup goes to a NTFS partition.
Connect your new drive and clone OS X - I use SuperDuper! - CCC is another option.
Boot to the new drive, open up Boot Camp Assistant and create the windows partition.
Once created, back out of it.
Then open up Winclone and restore the backup to the new BootCamp partition.

Others have reported problems with Winclone - I've successfully done the above 4 times in the last few months with SL & Win 7.

I have Lion so Winclone won't work anymore. Any other ideas?

Did you read my first reply? Buy the application that I suggested to you. It's the only one that works correctly. WinClone is no longer being developed. And even when it was, it had a tendency to be buggy.

If you don't want to buy CampTune, your other choice is to backup the Win 7 partition using the Win 7 backup and imaging program (to an external NTFS formatted drive), then wipe the partition from OS X using the Boot Camp Assistant, after which you can start over again by creating a new partition of the size you want.

Guess I'm going to have to get with the program and start using the Win 7 backup myself now.

Have the media moved from my HTPC to the new RAID1 device and think I have a spare external big enough to back up the rest.