Upgrading Laptop HDD - Cloning to external HDD?

[RonaldRayGun]

Hi all,

Been lurking for a while now and unfortunately my first post is going to be asking for help.

I've got a 160gb SATA HDD in my Laptop which has finally reached it's capacity. I've recently switched to Linux and i'm triple booting Windows , Ubuntu and Backtrack.

I'm now looking to upgrade my HDD and rather than going through the installation of everything again I've been looking into cloning the disk using DDRESCUE? I'm fairly new to Linux and have never used the program before so was wondering if anyone could shed any light?

I've got a 500gb external HDD so ideally clone my 160GB internal drive to that, replace the internal drive with a bigger one, boot off a live usb then restore the clone from the external drive to the internal one and ideally just use my laptop as it is now.

Am I missing anything or should this be doable? Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers guys(and gals)

[pzlq17]

It is possible to back up the information, however I have never had to move the information back before.. I will post the instructions for backing up the data and you're going to need to try some things to get it from the External back to the drive, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Open Terminal

#~ mkdir /media/disk
#~ mount /dev/sdc1 /media/disk/
#~ dd if=/dev/sda/ | bzip -z > /media/disk/backup.bz2

(#~ is a new line of script, sdc1 is the external drive in my case, and sda is my entire internal harddrive) (So you'll need to replace those with your own values, I hope you're successful)


p.s. Also if you're able to send the compressed backup back to your computer successfully.. Could you let me know how you did it?