Sorry this won’t be very interesting to most of my regular readers, but I find the blog to be a good place to deposit notes about my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants experiences my server and generally learning about Linux, too.  So, you’ve been warned…

I was able to image over my server partitions without any problems.  Two things that I initially forgot to consider:
• I need a boot loader in the MBR on the new drive
• Since I was switching from an IDE to SATA interface, my fstab was all messed up on the other side– even trying to boot the system with a boot disc didn’t work, because fstab was looking to mount a device that didn’t exist anymore (I believe that if I had just moved over to a new IDE drive, this wouldn’t have happened, so long as the partitions were named the same way).
I tried to use nano to edit fstab from the command line right on the Slackware box.  That didn’t work, because the file I was trying to edit was on a read-only filesystem.  Rather than dick around with learning new commands, I will try tried to boot into an Ubuntu live environment, mount the root partition on the hard disc, edit the file with gedit, and then attempt to reboot with the Slackware disc.  THAT WORKED.

After that, I booted from the Slackware install disc and skipped through everything other than reinstalling LILO.  I made a “boot USB stick,” too, but I think that might have actually screwed up the MBR in a different way; now I can boot from the hard drive, but I need to actively be there to choose Linux (rather than Windows ???) as the system to start.  Might try installing again, this time without making a USB booter.