[TriLUG] How to move root partition?

[Tom Bryan]

I have 3 hard drives on my main machine.  Because of their history, I have  
parts ended up with /, parts of /usr, and /home spread across the three 
drives.  I have just freed up some space, and I'd like to get the 3 drives 
down to 2 so that I can use the third for a new box I'm building to play with 
Debian.

I've planned most of the steps of the move, but I need some (hopefully simple) 
advice.

1) I'm going to have to move /, /usr, and /home during this migration.  In all 
cases, I will be moving them to another hard drive on the same machine.  What 
is the best way to move the data?  I'd like to preserve symlinks, 
permissions, modtimes, and such.  A simple cp -p?  Something more fancy?  
Speed isn't crucial since I have all day, but correctness and not losing 
anything is.  I have a bunch of unused space in /opt if I need to temporarily 
dump some data locally (for example, if the best approach is to dump(8) /home 
there and then restore(8) it to a new location).  

2) The drive that currently houses my root partition (which includes /boot) is 
the one that's going away.  Do I need to do anything special when moving my 
root partition?  Do I just copy the data and then toggle the bootable flag in 
fdisk?

3) Does grub have the old "1024 cylinder" limitation that LILO had?  I've 
always separated / and /usr in the past so that / will be small and can fit 
under the 1024th cylinder.  I'd love to drop that restriction since otherwise 
I'll need to repartition a disk that has a lot of data on it.  

Thanks,
---Tom