Best way to upgrade system partitions/directories to a new drive

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Hello, I'm new to RHEL; sorry if this is an obvious question, searching didn't provide much help at my level of understanding.

I have a new Dell T7920 pre-loaded with RHEL 8.0. I ordered it with their UltraSpeed Quad card and one 256GB M.2NVMe device on it (which is the boot device; it can hold 1-4 NVMe sticks). I'll call this the "old" drive.

I want to upgrade to a larger, 1TB device to hold all the system partitions/directories. I'll call this the "new" drive. I'll eventually use the smaller original drive for simple file storage.

My question is this: what are the recommended ways to perform this kind of drive upgrade?

The system is quite new, and so I've invested very little time installing and configuring. It will eventually be used as a standalone workstation for me in my small business.

As I see it, there are 3 main options:

  1. Remove the old drive, install the new one, and re-install the latest RHEL from scratch. This option seems easiest, but concerns me only because it is hard to tell if there are any special drivers or other important software installed by Dell. Searching their website is quite unhelpful in this regard.

  2. Create a backup of the old system drive, using something like ReaR. Install the new drive; manually partition it; manually copy files from the existing system partitions from the old drive onto the corresponding partitions of the new drive; somehow make the new drive bootable; remove the old drive and reboot.

  3. Create a backup of the old system drive, using something like ReaR. Remove the old drive; install the new drive in its place; boot from a backup image on USB; restore data from the old partitions into the corresponding new drive, relying on the backup/restore software to create the new partitions as part of the restoration.

Also, in all of these cases, will I need to de-subscribe the machine from RH and then re-subscribe after the drive update is complete? IOW, does having a new system disk change the machine's signature?

Any advice, suggestions, or pointers would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
--Bob

BS

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