From Matt Browne via wlug secretary.
Glenn Ramsey wrote:
Hi,
I need to install a bigger hard drive in my laptop which dual boots Windows & Linux. I was wondering if anyone knows of any gotchas that I should be aware of?
What I'm planning to do is to boot from the GParted liveCD and first use dd to clone the original drive with
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
and then use gparted to resize the partitions.
Seems too simple, have I missed something?
Glenn
If you're copying from a drive smaller than 137GB to one that larger than 137GB you may find the new drive won't boot afterwards if cloned using dd or Clonezilla. From my experience even reinstalling the boot loader doesn't help in this situation. I don't know the exact reason behind this is, but I expect it's due to drives that exceed the 48-bit LBA boundary requiring a slightly different partition layout. A fresh OS install though will boot fine so for Linux partitions at least a cp -a afterwards will do the trick. I'm not aware of a nice way to work around this for Windows partitions. Not sure if this problem still exists with SATA, but I've run into it a few times with PATA drives. Matt Browne