> This seemed to work out very fine, but I soon relised that > the content of /n/olddisk now was the filesystem on sdC0, > instead of sdD0 as one might have expected?
if these are actually sata drives, without a detailed motherboard manual or creative interpretation of the silkscreening on the motherboard in addition to some information on how bios is mapping sata ports, there's no telling where you're drive will end up. if you run in ahci mode, you can eliminate the bios mapping problem. then you'll be back to the previous situation where you only need to know how the ports on the motherboard are numbered. generally the motherboard manual will tell you which ports are which. that failing, sometimes you can see enough of the silkscreening to tell you which port is which. - erik
