Copy entire filesystem

[adavis@netpci.com]

I have gotten a new, larger harddisk, and wish to use it to expand my
existing linux box.  I would like to copy the filesystems off the old hard
disk, and replace it with this one.  

So far I haven't succeeded.  I haven't been able to confine tar's action to
a single filesystem (so that directories linked to directories on other
filesystems, on the other system drive, will not be copied.  Included is the
linux boot filesystem, /dev/hda2.  I basically want the current drive
duplicated to the new drive, with larger partitions, and another partition.  

When I thought I had it right, and edited /etc/fstab using a rescue disk,
the disk failed somehow.

 My questions are, again, how to copy a filesystem but not it's linked
directories from other drives, and, second, how to do this whole job
successfully.  

I don't want to reinstall debian, since there is so much software on the
system that I would have to reinstall.  Is there a clean way to do that
whole job, though?

Thanks again.  (By the way, we now have slackware 3.4 running on the gateway
2K 486 machine that was donated to our department.  I plan to get this going
right, now, and start working on the department LAN.  Thanks to list
members, six of whom showed strong support within hours of my earlier
posting.)  

Alan 


-- 
Alan E. Davis                       Marianas High School (Science Department)     
AAA196, Box 10001    adavis@netpci.com   http://www.saipan.netpci.com/~adavis   
Saipan, MP  96950    15.16oN 145.7oE    GMT+10       Northern Mariana Islands