Upgrading a hard disk

Here is my usual procedure for upgrading a hard disk, that is, replacing a hard disk with a larger hard disk but getting everything on the old disk onto the new disk so it looks just as it did before but with more space. I'm a Linux person, but these steps work for hard disks with Windows on them, too.

With the old disk still in the computer, plug in the new disk.
Boot a GParted Live CD or USB (it's free software) in the machine.
Open a terminal (close the partition resizing GUI, as it's not used in this step). Use fdisk to figure out which device is the old disk and which is the new disk, e.g., sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda and sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb. Typically, the old disk will be sda and the new one will be sdb, but not always, so be sure to check. For this article, I'll assume the old disk is sda.
Run
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096
Depending on the size of the old disk, this can take 15 minutes to a few hours (perhaps even overnight if the old disk is large, I suppose). Sadly, dd does not give you a progress indicator; you just have to wait for the prompt to come back. You may notice the hard drive activity light blinking furiously. This indicates that the disk is being heavily read or written to depending on which disk you're looking at, which is expected. When the lights stop blinking, dd is probably done.
Once dd is finished, shut the machine down, remove the old disk, make the new disk the primary drive, and boot the system. During bootup, you may see the system do a check on the file system(s) on the new disk; this is okay. Once booted up, the system should look just like it did with the old disk, including the same probably-nearly-full partitions--that is, there won't appear to be any additional space; this is also okay. This step is just to make sure the OS on the new disk can boot.
Reboot the system with GParted again. This time, use the GUI tool to resize the partitions to make use of the additional space. Once this finishes, reboot the system from the hard disk, and you should see all the space of your new disk.

Additional steps needed for Dell laptops

My brother had a Dell Inspiron E1405 laptop into which he asked me to put a larger disk. I used the steps above as I had done on many other machines previously. But when I booted with the new disk, it showed up in the BIOS & GParted as being the same size as the old disk. The source of the trouble turned out to be Dell's hidden MediaDirect partition and the sneaky way the machine gets to it. See http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/ for more details. To fix the problem is fairly straightforward:

Use the steps described by Brian K here (specifically, post #27) on using Roadkil's Sector Editor to zero out LBA-3.
He goes on to use the Magic Boot Disk to disable the HPA, but I got an error when I tried it. Instead, using HDAT2 I was able to disable the HPA. In HDAT2, I had to set the LBA to to 28-bit mode, as it failed when I used the default 48-bit.

After disabling the HPA, I booted from the hard disk, just to make sure the system would still boot. Then I rebooted with GParted, changed the partition sizes, and then was able to boot back into Windows and see the full capacity of the new disk.

09/11/2010