How to replace my disk without having to rebuild my Ubuntu install? [duplicate]

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb will create an exact replica of sda to sdb as long as sdb is at least as big as sda.

Plugin your hard disk to your system, make sure the BIOS is recognizing it correctly and boot normally to your system.

Check your hard disks with Disk Utility(To launch Disk Utility, you can use the dash),
make sure that your old hard disk is sda and your new hard disk is sdb (change the devices on the example command to reflect your hardware configuration), no need to mount the new disk (it should be empty anyways so there is nothing to mount).

Run the command with the right devices in a terminal wait until its finished and that's it.

PS: triple check the command and make sure that your old hard disk is in the if part and that your new disk is in the of part of the command.

Your partitions will be copied from your old disk to the new one byte by byte so no need to worry about reconfiguring / installing MBR and bootloader. The only thing you need to do after the disk is copied is to remove the old disk from the system or set the new disk as boot device in your BIOS.

Later on when you tested that all is ok you can resize your partitions on the new disk with gparted, boot from a LiveCD, install gparted and resize the partitions of your new disk to fit your needs.

This solution requires no installation of extra tools except for the installation of gparted later on for resizing the partitions.

If you are looking for an application which has a GUI, check Clonezilla:
http://clonezilla.org/
http://www.howtoforge.com/back-up-restore-hard-drives-and-partitions-with-clonezilla-live http://www.backuphowto.info/how-to-backup-your-data-in-linux-using-clonezilla

Without a GUI:
http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backup-hard-disk-clone-dd
http://mark.koli.ch/2009/05/howto-whole-disk-backups-with-dd-gzip-and-p7zip.html

I would recommend partimage.
You can live-boot, install partimage and copy your partitions over.
What I really like about this software is that it is quite easy to handle (it's semi-graphical :-) ) and it's fast because it only copies the non-empty blocks. In other words you can copy a 10Gb partition to a bigger (on your new drive) one without much hassle.

Install it with apt-get.
more here: http://www.partimage.org/

May I suggest that you consider the 150GB drive to already be a backup of your home folder?

I would replace the 150GB drive with the 1TB drive and install Ubuntu with the same version that is on the 150GB drive. I would create a separate /home partition.

Next I would shut down and connect the 150GB drive to the machine and boot.

After that, I would mount the 150GB drive and copy the contents of the 150GB drive's home folder into the home folder of the /home partition of the 1TB drive. I would include all of the hidden files that begin with a dot (.) that you see when you select View>Show Hidden files in the File Manager menu.

I would then re-boot with the hope that the installed programs and utilities would pick up the configuration files in their respective dot (.) folders. Certainly the data in the Documents and Music folders (and other such folders) would be there.

I had to do something similar a few years ago when I created a separate /home partition without knowing that the OS would break because it could not find its /home folder. I did not have backup of my data. I solved my problem by installing Ubuntu into another partition. I copied my data into it. I then re-installed Ubuntu in my working / partition and set the mount point for my new /home partition and then copied my data back from the specially installed Ubuntu partition.

It is not the clever or beautiful solution but it works. I can say that from experience.

Regards.