Les Mikesell wrote:
You shouldn't have any problem as long as you can still read the old disk and the new one is the same size. Just don't try to boot with both drives still in place after the copy because you will have duplicate disk labels. Those used to confuse the kernel when booting, but perhaps it has been fixed by now.
I inadvertently did this just a few days ago. It seemed to work OK. I replaced a hard disk with a different one that already had /, swap, and /home partitions on it. This didn't seem to cause any problem. I was not sure which / I was actually using though. I relabeled using ex2label and rebooted with no apparent problems.
