How to clone a secondary HDD?

[g1xx3r]

OK,here is the deal.My rig is in my sig.I have all games,documents,music Steam etc on my 150gb raptor.I have W7 setup so all those files,doc,pic etc are on the second drive as well as game installs.I just purchased a 300gb Velociraptor to replace the 150gb raptor.What is the best way to clone the 150gb to the 300gb Velociraptor?Also,will I be able to rename the drive when done..Thanks.

 

[sub.mesa]

Backup all your data
copy disk1 to disk2
verify data and restore from backup if needed
expand partition so you can use the other 150GB capacity on the 300GB velociraptor

To copy a raw disk, using Ubuntu is generally my prefered method; but i'm sure there are lots of commercial/windows applications that do it too. A simple dd would raw copy any content on the 150GB raptor to the 300GB raptor.

MAKE SURE WINDOWS DOES NOT SEE BOTH DISKS! It may act strangely when it detects two filesystems with the same unique identifier; ive heard sometimes hides both disks in this case.

If you do wish to use Ubuntu, check your current connected drive names with:
dmesg | grep sda

As soon as you know your drives, continue with cloning:
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

This command would copy everything from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb. sda should be the 150GB raptor; sdb should be the 300GB raptor; triple check this before hitting enter on the dd command!