norton ghost and equivalents should take care of the disk copy. or you can just be hardcore and do the dd and fdisk way.

Using dd (or any other byte-for-byte copy utility) has a major drawback in that your new filesystem will end up being the exact same size as the original, no matter how big the destination partition is. If there were some sort of growe2fs command for Linux, it'd be different, but I don't think that there is.

i remember reading the first tivo upgrade guides that had you partition correctly, then save the partition table of the destination drive using dd, copy over the source with dd, and then dd'ing back the partition table, and then running the checkdisk utility accordingly.

this assumes that you keep the eact partition sizes except the last partition, which you can grow to the maximum length. works especially well when there is only one partition to deal with.

How do you grow the filesystem?

resize2fs

I stand corrected.