Hard Drive Cloning in Ubutnu

I'm buying a new computer, but the new computer is without a hard drive nor a video card. My computer is going to Victor who's has increasingly found it difficult to buy games for his computer, even games that are 4 years old. Victor will get my old 120 Gig drive and I'll just use the 450 Gig drive that's also been on my computer for a while.
I've been running my computer off an older 120 Gig Maxtor with another 450 Gig used for backup and some larger files. My idea was to offload all the files off the 450 Gig (to my 1 TB drive my video server) and move all my stuff from the 120 to the 450 and just use the 450.
I searched the Internet but it was not clear what the best method was to use.
In short I:
  • Copied off all the old files off my 450 Gig drive using rsync.
  • I used GParted to clone the 120 GB drive to 450 GB (using copy-paste!). I created a bootable "live" version of GParted CD from here.
  • I unplugged the 120GB drive and just left the 450GB in it's place.
  • I used an Ubuntu boot disk to create a boot partition.
  • Rebooted, and it worked!
The links above goes through the steps. I would have been nice if GParted had created the boot partition as well (and maybe it can, I don't know), but this method worked just fine.
My usual m.o. when getting a new drive has been just to put it in the computer, and mount it as a separate folder. Now that I've done this once, I think I'll clone the drive instead and use the older drive for backup, etc.

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