How to Swap out O/S drive keeping greyhole intact

[ralfb]

Hello,

I have an 80GB SATA drive for my O/S and would like to swap it out for an 80GB IDE drive so that I can free up one SATA port on my motherboard.

In addition I have 3 x2TB drives in a greyhole storage pool.

Is this possible, and if so how?

I'm new to Linux, but I think in Linux it's possible to clone drives much simpler than in Windows. How may I accomplish this, assuming I've connected the IDE drive.

Do I need to address any disk mounting etc?

How do I clone a drive?

Can I simply remove the SATA drive afterwards?

I'd be most grateful if someone were to take me through the steps.

many kind thanks

Ralf

PS. I'm digressing a bit, is it possible to upgrade my O/S from 32bit to 64bit and keep my existing greyhole storage pool and shares or is it not worth the effort?

I'm asking as I'm using VirtualBox to run Win7 and it seems simpler using a 64 bit O/S?

I'd be grateful for your thoughts.

Thanks again,

Ralf