I still worry about the byte-by-byte part of dd - I'm not enough of a filesystem expert, but my hunch is that there still might be disk-specific stuff on a dd dump. Also, if that disk only has data, why not just do a "cp -r /mnt/olddisk /home/user/newdisk" ?

In terms of time - not that outrageous, I think using your external enclosure is a dandy way to do your copy.

Jay

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 10:29 PM, Richard Carter < rwcarter@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:

1. I'd avoid dd. Disk dumps sound like a great idea in theory. But all of the OS hardware will change, the partition tables will change, everything in /etc will change, etc.

But I don't have a Linux partition to migrate, only Windows. Furthermore, I'm swapping hard drives in one computer, not migrating an old computer to a new computer. I'm simply upgrading my laptop's hard drive, all the hardware will remain the exact same.

And trying to do a disk dump from your original 160G hard drive to a partition on your 500... holy moly.

But... it would only be a 160gb transfer. I mean, sure it would take some time despite being USB 2.0 but it's not THAT outrageous... right?