hi,
i have several partitions on a hard drive, let's call it sdb. I want to copy them all to a larger drive, let's call it sdc. I want to expand sdb1/sdc1 to fill up the remaining space while keeping sdb2-8 exactly the same. sdb1 is the boot partition with Linux installed on an ext2 filesystem.

I've managed to recreate the partitions on sdc as per my requirements, and I've dd'ed sdb2-8 to sdc2-8. I've also dd'ed the MBR from sdb to sdc, then modified the MBR partition table values to keep it consistent with the actual partitions, and fdisk recognizes the updated sdc paritions correctly. However, when I dd sdb1 to sdc1, this also seems to change the partition size of sdc1 to that of sdc1 when I mount sdc1 and check it with df.

How do I change the partition size of sdc1 while having the contents of sdb1?

I would recommend clonezilla and gparted. Clonezilla is a tool which will clone a partition either onto the same disk or a different. Gparted is a really easy graphical tool to use which will let you resize a partition. The process does take a while depending on how fast your computer is but it is by far the easiest and safest way to do it

Does clonezilla support the automatic resizing of partitions if the source and destination partitions are different in size?

I've tried using gparted, but I wasn't able to get the accuracy I need. I need to be able to resize down to sector sizes, but gparted only lets me resize in terms of MB.

you could use parted from the command line or create the partition from scratch with fdisk. clonezilla only copies one partition over to another. so you will have to make sure the destination partition is big enough first

Thanks. Yup the destination partition will be big enough. In fact it is about 4x as big as the source. I've already created those partitions with fdisk from scratch. I just want to make sure that clonezilla will be smart enough to clone it such at the destination partition is expanded to its entire capacity, coz dd wasn't that smart.