[pally01]

Update: Done Succesfully!!!!!!!!

First off, thanks guys for all the info contained above. I used all of it at some point or another and the links were invaluable.

I spent much of today trying to get this task done. Ultimately, what worked was using the dd "clone disk" command. I was really apprehensive about doing command line stuff with linux, so I tried Clonezilla first.

Clonezilla seemed to work well for most of the cloning, but near the end where it tries to find/write the GRUB info, certain files weren't found. The cloned disk wouldn't boot. I tried to repair the GRUB data but that didn't work out too well. I went through it a few times and got the same errors/result, so I jumped into dd commands.

dd cloning took wayyyyy longer than Clonezilla did. When it finished I tried to boot with the cloned drive and it worked like a charm! I'm very pleased that all the time invested paid off.

I decided that I want to tinker more with Linux, and I happen to have a brand new pc just begging to be used. So I bought an SSD for it and set-up a dual-boot with Win8, though getting it to actually dual-boot was another fun Linux-learning lesson for me.

All-in-all, a great day of Linux dabbling and learning. Wouldn't trade it for anything.