migrating old laptop hard-drive to new large HDD?

[DancesWithWords]

I just bought a larger hard drive for my laptop and I want to move or copy the full contents to the new drive. The drive has windows partition and my gentoo partitions. What is the best why get them on the new hard-drive?

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DWW

[fangorn]

for the linux partitions, create new partitions with fdisk with the exact same number of bytes and copy them with dd.
Or make a tar backup of the partitions and extract it to new partitions (which can then have different sizes and/or filesystem).

Both ways you will have to install your boot manager by hand on the new disk.

For windows you can use the first version. create a new partition of the same size and copy the data of the old partition to it. But with windows there is no guarantee that it will work. Because windows partitions and their size depend on the geometry of the harddisk, it is possible, that windows cant recognize the old partition size on the new harddisk. The only way to be sure is to use a imaging tool that can image the windows partitions to a new size. In the old days I used norton ghost for such tasks. Dont know of any linux software that can do this with ntfs formated partitions.

[syg00]

Personally I'm not a big fan of the image-ing options. Too much dicking around adjusting filesystems to fit the new partition(s).
"cp -a ..." works most of the time - the pseudo filesystems can be a pain on a live system.

Have a look for the stage4 threads here - I used it once to save my butt on the work laptop.
Worked fine - simple and well documented.
*AND* you get another backup - just in case ....

Edit: forgot Winders.
Bill doesn't like you doing things like this - do it enough and you'll have to ring up for a new activation code.
Ask me how I know ...
Can't help you.