Debian on SD card, card full up, best course of action
 

I've got debian installed and working nicely on a sheevaplug. I've got it running off of a 4Gb SD card but that's now full.

I don't want to go through the palava of installing from scratch and getting all my software working again.
Can i clone the 4Gb card to a 16Gb card and make use of the extra space?
What is the best way of doing this?
I have a windows7 laptop with SD card reader, i have a virtualbox running linux but it doesn't see the card reader.

The sheeva obviously only has the one SD card slot and i don't have a separate reader handy.

Please advise...

Many thanks!

Yes you can copy a GNU linux from a filesystem off to another. Basically:
cp -dpr sdcard_source/* tmp/
then replace the card,
cp -dpr tmp/* sdcard_dest/
and it works exactly the same.

I got a bit of experience running on low space; I run debian totally on RAM, 2 giga, with harddisk used only for booting init and root disk image, otherwise it's turned off and never used in session.
I use a compressed reiser4 filesystem which at the current status is able to hold a full home system in RAM: 4 GB of data is compressed in 800 MB, transparently, usably, and savable back to harddisk at shutdown.
Maybe this interests you, too.

Thankyou. I guess i can run a live cd on my laptop to do that.

That is technically interesting to me, although the sheeva only has 512Mb of RAM and is not upgradable, so this method is no good for me with this system.