[wplug] Copying a harddrive

[Robert E. Coutch]

Maybe you have a better way to do this.
Here's the situation.

Someone wants to upgrade from a small sized hard disk to a larger one.
They don't wan't to reinstall their entire system (usually Windows).

Normally I do the following:

Add the new drive to the current system and boot under Linux from CD-ROM 
(Knoppix or Disto rescue CD).

Use fdisk to create a new partition on the new hard drive (we'll say its 
/dev/hdb).
Set the partition type (Linux, NTFS, etc).
Set the partition active and write the table.

Copy the old drive partition (/dev/hda1) to the new one (/dev/hdb1):
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1

I now have a duplicate of the old drive including the size of the old drive on 
the new drive.

I then run Partition Commander to expand the partiton to the full size of the 
drive.

I remove the old drive and permantly install the new one.

System is good to go.


My questions are:
Is there a better way of doing this without paying for some custom software?  
Am I using dd correctly?
Do I need to state block size and what happenes when I don't?


Thanks for you help,

Bob