drooid,

Welcome to Justlinux!

I believe the hidden Vista partition will work in the clone.

In your case, you are cloning different makes of hard disks I strongly advise you to check and ensure the new target disk is at lease as large as the existing source disk. This means the new disk must have the number of sectors at least the same or more than the source disk, otherwise your new disk will not work because the partition table will indicate a bigger number sectors than actually available. No operating system would touch such disk as no one would know what to do with it while guaranteeing the data security at the same time.

Using a desktop to do the cloning, while removing all the existing hard disks, is a smart move especially if you are not comfortable with the device names from the Linux side. I have used 3.5" to 2.5" adaptor to carry out such cloning before but that was for Pata disks. I am not aware the same kind of adaptor is sold for Sata disks though.

What I have discovered recently is the use of eSata on a laptop. One can buy such adaptor in the PCMCIA slot or the newer narrorwer card bus slot. There are 2.5" hard disk enclosures sold with both USB and eSata connectors. The eSata is about 2 to 3 times faster than USB connection and well worth having. It allows a faster transfer on your 2.5" disk whenever it is used externelly. This way you don't have to use a desktop PC at all.

I have done this myself recently cloning a new HP laptop, changing its 150Gb hard disk to 250Gb disk within 24 hours after the purchase while on a holiday.

If you clone Vista, which has its own resizer facility internally, then any Linux Live CD will provide you with the Bash command dd. While on holiday I just download Slax, burn it into a CD and use it to do the cloning.

Lastly I strongly recommend check the disk geometry by the Linux terminal command
Code:
fdisk -l
IN it you should know exactly the device names of every partition and hard disk. As long as you make sure the output file (the "of=/dev/sdx" in the dd command) is correctly pointed to your target disk you should have a successful migration.