hard drive migration

[Keziah W <keziahw@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I currently have Debian installed on a 10 GB partition of an IDE hard
drive. I just got a bigger hard drive (also IDE), and have partitioned
30 GB for Debian. I want to move my existing Debian installation to
the larger drive, but I am not sure if that will break the
installation.
My root partition right now is hda2. The partition that I want to copy
it to is hdb1, but after I copy it I would like to make it the master
drive, so it will be hda1.
So, basically, if the name of the root partition changes from hda2 to
hda1, will that break my Debian installation?

If that will work:

What flags do I need to use with cp to copy the full contents of a
drive, with the symlinks still pointing to the same files? Will "cp
--no-dereference --preserve=all" work?

-----------------------------------------

Is there some way to do all this with the packaging system, maybe like
installing the core onto the new partition, and then copying the
packages from the old one?



Thank you!
Keziah