Sorry for the delayed response - I've been away with only phone access and that sends HTML emails that the list won't accept.
On Sat, 24 Oct 2020 at 16:22, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
Can I simply connect both drives to SATA interfaces on another system and (very carefully!) us dd to copy from the old disk to the new one? Will this copy the boot sectors, the windows partitions and everything correctly?
Yes, this should work.
It'll be slow, though and if you want to resize anything other than the last partition you're going to struggle to do it later.
There are several tools that should be able to do this faster and handle the resize at the same time. In terms of FOSS options, a live CD that contains CloneZilla or GParted is probably your best option, eg GParted Live or one of many multi-tool CDs that include them - there's a list on the GParted Live download page:
http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live.php https://gparted.org/livecd.php
There are also various commercial tools, some of them free as in beer; I don't have a lot of recent experience of any of them but past experience is that they tended to be easier to use and faster. But things move on and you'll probably waste more time finding the right tool than using it anyway!
I know I'll need to resize the partitions after doing this but the alternative of recreating all the partitions from scratch and then copying the contents of each (there are four partitions I think) seems rather messy.
It's not hard to export the partition table and apply it to the new disk (even editing it for size as you go) but the biggest downside of that is that the finished copy probably won't work, at least not the boot or Windows partitions. (Linux is far more forgiving.)
The advantage of just copying the contents is speed - no time wasted copying unused sectors of the old disk. Not much of a gain if the finished result doesn't work, but commercial disk imagers, and tools like CloneZilla, "understand" common filesystems and don't copy unused areas of them, getting you that same benefit without leaving you with an unbootable disk.