Copy an entire hard drive

[pmithrandir]

Hello,

In my laptop, I have different partition on my harddrive.
The first one the te rescue system, the second one windows vista, and 5 or 6 others partitions for linux and my datas.

I recently acquired a bigger and faster harddrive, so I would like to copy all the content of the first harddrive on the new one.

To be precise, The most importants are windows and the rescue partitions as they are very hard to create from scratch.
Mageia would be only few minutes from my USB key to install.

If you have any ideas, and safe... I will be glad.

I saw 2 method online :
A cat /dev/sda > /dev/sdb

Or a similar command with dd.

Are they valid ?

Pierre

[oj]

I'd use dd, then remove all the partitions after the two windows partitions, then repartition that space as needed, and reinstall the Linux side of things.

Note when you do this it will copy the amount of space on the old drive onto the new drive 'verbatim,' meaning if the new drive is larger, the end of that drive will be empty. You may actually just partition the leftover free space and install other distributions.

[JoesCat]

When you use dd, you'll want to specify a large block size so that it goes much quicker. Some of the older versions of dd default to block size of 512b or 4k. You could use a much larger value such as 1M