>Umm -- I'd worry about boot sectors, path names too long for tar, etc.

a quick survey of the "dos" partition shows that the longest present
path is 108 characters.  tar's okay with that.  that said, they belong
to mp3s that i was playing today, and i can just as easily nuke them.

>When I've copied laptop drives -- and I've done it a fair number of 
>times -- I use the utility that's almost always included with the new 
>drive (I upgrade laptops -- it's *always* a pain) to copy the Windows 
>partition, and then use tar or dump/restore to move the Unix files.  
>Actually, I generally do a clean install on the new drive, and then 
>copy over /home/smb.

i was *planning* on dumping my netbsd partitions to an nfs volume,
booting from install floppies, arranging the disk (fdisk, disklabel,
newfs), copying enough of the install media to boot and get a single
user shell (and configure the network), and then restoring the dumps
from the nfs volume.  for the dos partition, i was hoping tar would
suffice.  i was cheap and in a hurry, so i got *only* a drive...no
free utilities for moving stuff...

>As for booting -- my guess is that with a new laptop, you won't have 
>any problems; the new BIOSes can handle large disks, and I think that 
>NetBSD can as well at this point.

note that the laptop isn't *all* that new...just the drive is.  the
laptop is two years old.

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