[arch-general] how to migrate installs between hard drives?

[Will Siddall]

I know this isn't particularly an arch question, but I know Arch
people are better off to ask then most.

I'm in the process of upgrading my hard drive in my laptop but with
the amounts of customizations I've done to my setup, I don't want to
have to set it all up again.

I know about running dd to copy the partition information, but the
problem with that is that it also copies that partition information
over.  So, if I copy my root partition that started as a 40G partition
with 90% used and now I have a 60G parition, the used portion will be
kept at 90% so, it'll show something like 50G of data... which doesn't
make sense.

I've also just tried copying the partitions to an external, mount the
iso's in a livecd session then copy the data over, but for some reason
after I modified the menu.lst and fstab files to match my new setup
and then restart, the computer doesn't boot.

Is there something I'm missing in the second instance that I didn't
change a file that should be changed?  Is there a better way of
copying the partitions so I don't run into this problem?

Thanks,
Will