I got my new laptop hard drive today (500gb 7200rpm!). Since I'm happy with my setup on my current drive, I want to copy it over as-is, so I also got a USB hard drive enclosure to make copying my data easy.

I have a 160gb drive right now. 100% of it is a NTFS partition (Windows 7 - unfortunately I use almost all of the 160gb so there wasn't enough room for Linux in this drive; my 320gb dual boot drive failed a couple months ago). I want to boot Ubuntu 10.04 from disc, copy the 160gb partition to the 500gb drive, expand it (probably from within Windows, to avoid problems), and install Ubuntu 10.04 in the rest.

So my questions:

- I know about the dd command, but I'm not sure exactly how I should use it to migrate my old hard drive to the new one. For example, would I copy sda->sdb, or sda1->sdb? An exact command example would be nice. I am capable of RingTFM but I'd rather get advice from a Linux expert than risk not noticing an important switch or something. Also are there any concerns copying a NTFS partition like this? I assume not, since dd is just a byte-for-byte copy, but please let me know if there's anything I should be aware of...

- Exactly how stable is the NTFS read/write in Ubuntu 10.04? Is it 110% guaranteed-not-to-corrupt-my-files stable? I often hesitate to mount my "C:\" drive from within Linux, or usually avoid it entirely, and I may add a FAT32 partition as a shared data storage if there's any reason I shouldn't trust it.

- What is the recommended size of the / partition in Ubuntu 10.04? And with my 2gb of RAM the swap should be what size?

I will probably prompt more discussion on Ubuntu 10.04 later, and if there's any possibility of a summer installfest I'll definitely be there.

Thanks in advance!

Ricket