I'd been looking for an excuse to try out the capabilities of GPartEd, which is a partition editor/mover/copier like Partition Magic, but is open-sourced under the GPL. Downloaded the ISO, burned it, and tried it out. BTW, the ISO is small enough to fit on a business-card-type CD.
Well, as it turns out, it worked perfectly --- BUT:
1) It does not copy the MBR, which boots the OS. Not really a biggie, I just had to figure out how to do that from the command line. It's only 446 bytes...
I think this is on the devs list of things to do.2) Gotta set partition flags (like "boot") manually. GPartEd lets you do it with a click, you just have to remember to.
2) Since I was moving a Windows system drive, I had fun with changing the system drive letter (it thought it was "F"), especially because I couldn't log into the new installation because it was looking for a user file on the "C:" drive.
This was the toughest issue to figure out, but it's Windows' fault, not GPartEd. (Incidentally, it's an easy registry edit.)Now, the good bit - it copied everything from my nearly full old 160 GB drive onto the new 300 GB drive in less than an hour. The old one is SATA 150, and the new one is SATA 300, but I think my old mobo wants to access them both at 133. Sigh. Anyway, I thought that was great performance. Then I resized the windows partition, which took about a minute. Then I changed my mind and wanted about 5 GB free for a "just in case" linux partition, and so shrunk the first and created that one. About a minute and a half. All this in a nice graphical interface from a bootable CD. Free.
Remaining tasks: Install GRUB on the new drive so I can boot to my new windows, my old windows, or my old linux partitions. Delete big unneeded programs from old drive so I can use it for data (photos, etc.)
