I'm using a new Thinkpad and I'm trying to upgrade the drive from a 250GB to a 640GB. I grabbed a WD Scorpio Blue and a ByteCC USB/SATA adapter.
First I tried booting Linux and doing a dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd bs=4M . This failed. The partition table was invalid after it was written. Normally this would work, so I figure it has to do with the number of sectors on the disk.
I then tried manually creating the partitions and doing a dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdd1 bs=4M, etc, etc. This resulted in something which was not bootable, and reading on "sector alignment" and stuff, I figure it's not the optimal way to do things.
So I went to try to do it the Windows way. I tried the WD edition of Acronis. It failed spectacularly, telling me that the target disk was smaller than the source (which in terms of sector count is probably correct)
After some searching, I then tried Casper. Casper seems to do a good job duplicating the disk, but it won't boot. So I created a Windows System Repair CD and booted...
The Windows System repair CD doesn't see the filesystems... it thinks the disks are "RAW" and need to be formatted.
Booting back on the 250 with the 640 mounted externally, chkdsk comes up clean. Everything is good. The filesystems look okay. The only thing I can think is weird is that Windows is insistent on assigning a drive letter to the partitions, which is a bit frustrating.
I'm at a loss as to how to troubleshoot this from here. It might be a simple Windows 7 boot thing at this point, so maybe somebody here has a much better idea of what I can try next. Any ideas?