moving to larger HD
 

My question is "Should this work."

Current Setup: (40GB laptop)

hda1 /boot
hda2 /
hda3 windows
hda4 swap

I've got a tar of my linux system, which I can apply to my new hard drive, now If I mount /dev/hda3 and do a   dd   if=/dev/hda3   of=/home/win.img   should I be able to do the reverse to apply that image to a new drive once I've replaced my 40GB with my new 80GB?

Sounds reasonable, but I never tried it on a windows partition. I guess the source and target partitions need to be exactly the same size. Is that possible? Can you put in both disks and dd directly? It seems a harmless thing to try, as it does not affect your original version.

Maybe wait for more expert opinion :)

I think the theory behind it is solid, I'm just not sure if it works in the "real world". I'm sure a few more people will lend their experiences.

moving to larger HD
 

Hello,

My opinion is that it must work but you may have to copy the MBR of the drive.
I should try to make a full DD of the original drive and restore it on the new one after. The use of a external HD will ease the procedure. After the restore, create new partitions or resize the existings partitions.

When creating the dd image, you can win some disk space if you gzip the image.
--
free_ouyo

You probably don't want to have /dev/hda3 mounted when you do this for the same reason that fsck doesn't like checking mounted partitions. The data on the hard drive might change, leading to a bad image. If you have to, mounting it read-only is safe.