Cloning a PATA (smaller) drive into a SATA drive (bigger)

[myNigga]

Hi everybody.

This is not specific to Gutsy, but I posted here since this is the version I'm using.
I have a 40GB PATA disk partitioned this way:

1 Primary partition - NTFS (Windows)
1 Primary partition - NTFS (some stuff)
1 Extended partition - 3 logical partitions on this one (a fat32, linux swap and ext3)

Trying to just create these partitions with a bigger size in the new SATA disk, and cloning the PATA partitions with PartitionImage doesn't work, because the backup will be restored with the original PATA sizes, and not "streteched" to the current partition size.
I booted with GParted USB-live and tried, errrr, a "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda" (where hda is the PATA drive and sda is the SATA). It took long, looked like an infinite loop, the drives didn't "move" after some time and I found out that I almost trashed the SATA disk. I was expecting it to just finish when all the hda stuff was copied, and of course it didn't happen.
Got the disk back in business and now I'm thinking of a way to just get my PATA installation on the SATA disk. "Why don't you just reinstall the stuff", you ask me, and I answer: I got no floppy drive to get SATA working on the XP64, and the Linux install is far too much "customized" to make a fresh install viable (will work on it later).
You guys got any suggestion? If you need some more info, just let me know.
Thanks a lot.

[cantab]

Re: Cloning a PATA (smaller) drive into a SATA drive (bigger)

Create partition on sata disk
In livecd, mount both disks
as root,

cp -a /mnt/old_partition/ /mnt/new_partition/

[dibl]

Re: Cloning a PATA (smaller) drive into a SATA drive (bigger)

cantab's method looks good.

Also, I haven't done it myself, but I was intrigued by a recent post that reporting using a "copy" command in GParted to copy a complete partition from one drive to another. I did go so far as to boot my Gparted Live CD, and indeed there is a "copy" command when you highlight a partition. You may need the GParted Live CD to get a recent version that offers that capability.

[myNigga]

Re: Cloning a PATA (smaller) drive into a SATA drive (bigger)

The solution looks real rough, and I got some other questions.
Lets assume I'm copying hda1, which has my winxp64 installation. Make a ntfs partition on new drive, mount hda1 (pata) and sda1 (sata), copy *.* from hda1 to sda1? What about the files attributes and special characters (like ç, ã, é)? Will they be kept?
After all is done, just point fstab to sdaX instead of hdaX and rerun grub?
If I got it wrong, can you guys elaborate on the subject?
TIA

[myNigga]

Re: Cloning a PATA (smaller) drive into a SATA drive (bigger)

Almost forgot to ask: how good (or bad) and reliable is the ntfs writing capabilities on Linux now? Do we load extra modules on the 7.10 livecd to make it work, or you're not referring to Ubuntu Livecd in the previous posts?