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[OCLUG-Tech] Adding a new, bigger SATA drive ??

Hi;

This question is for sometime in the near but indefinite future. I want
to buy a monitor first.

Presently I have an  AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ on a
Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard.  I am using 2 Maxtor 40Gb PATA/IDE
harddrives; 1 with a Linux installation; the other is for WindowsXP.  I
am thinking about buying a new, larger SATA Drive (350 Gb ??) for my
Linux installation.

How do you move a whole system from the 40Gb drive to the new SATA
drive?  I have seen techies with the box open and a new drive attached
to a bus while 'something' was 'copying' the contents of the old drive
to the new.  I suspect that the copying was not files directly but an
'image ??' and that they might be using 'dd'.

I am asking because I have read on some mailing lists (not ours) about
people getting into trouble; needing exact match and pre-partioning etc.
I have read the 'man' on 'dd' and it seems straight forward, but I am
not sure.

Is 'dd' the way to go about it?  If so, is there any tips, traps or
gotchas I have to watch out for?  If 'dd' is not the right program, what
is the usual way of doing this new disk installation?  My motherboard is
rigged for both IDE and SATA.  Will there be a problem using 1 IDE/PATA
disk and 1 SATA disk together? I have backup partitions on both drives,
one to backup the other.

Will Grub immediately recognize the new disk, or, do I have to fiddle
with Grub?  Grub fiddling is OK, if I am forewarned.

-- 
Regards Bill