How to migrate XP, Vista, Linux, BSD and Solaris to a bigger hard disk

[saikee]

If you clone a partition or the entire disk using dd then you must remember it is a hardware type copying. In it the cloning procedure is controlled by counting sector by sector. This effectively means you can only use dd if the target disk is bigger than the source disk. And in the case of partition-to-partition cloning you need to ensure both partitions are indentical in size, down to the exact number of sectors. Disk-to-disk cloning is a lot saimpler and easier because there is nothing to do except making sure the target is exactly the same size or just larger.

Therefore dd should only be used for sector-by-sector cloning.

If you use tar then it is "the filing system" that get copied so the size of the partition is inmaterial! You do have to format the partition first before you can use tar. For dd you don't even need to bother with the partition table, let alone formatting each partition. So the two are totally different methods.

Linux can be copied from partition to partition without problem as long as you know how to mount the partitions using /etc/fstab and updating the Grub's menu.lst if the partition is used for booting.

I would not recommend you to use dd if the partition content can be migrated using tar. dd is good if you want simplicity (like cloning the whole disk) and the disk is actually having a read/write error (dd does not deal with the files, it copies the binary bits). If you clone the entire disk then the existing sdc1 will be overwritten.