I’m documenting this here mostly for my own purposes. This is the process I followed (eventually) to replace my aging Linux box. First with a 4TB hard drive then adding an SSD (while retaining the HD).
I won’t go into detail about the system hardware. It’s not state of the art, it’s not even recent. It’s just a huge step up from the previous box. It’s also smaller and quieter.
The first step was to clone my existing hard drive to the new 4TB drive. This was a relatively simple process as I wasn’t planning to use the old drive on the new system. So I just installed the new drive in the old system and used dd to copy one drive to the other.
Something like: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=100M status=progress
Many hours later, I had a clone of the original drive.