Moving Fedora system to new disk

[Timothy Murphy]

I'm planning on moving the Fedora-20 system on my laptop
to a new hard disk (500GB instead of 80GB).
I've partitioned the new disk.
When I copy partitions from the old disk to the new one
with "cp -a" (running under a Fedora Live CD)
I get a lot of messages of the form
  diff: a/bin/acroread: No such file or directory
  diff: b/bin/acroread: No such file or directory

All the messages concern symbolic links.
I see in "man cp" that  "cp -a" included
  "--no-dereference never follow symbolic links in SOURCE"

Does this mean cp is not an appropriate way to copy partitions?
I thought of using dd, but the partitions are not the same size,
and I was not sure if this would cause problems.

Any suggestions gratefully received.