Question: I am about to upgrade the hard disk of my MacBook. (From 60GB to 320GB, which I know is below the limit of 500GB).

I was both able to install an OS X on the new drive and also to transfer the old hard disks partition to the new one with a [sysresccd](http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page) (linux live disk) and `dd` (`dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda`, so entire disk). So it's not a problem of hardware, limitations or restrictions.

So, after having transferred the 60 GB-disk to the new one, every partition manager would show me that there is about 260GB left on the disk, but none would allow me to resize the partition.

The `Disk Utility` on the OS X installation cd allowes to resize, but also erases the data. I tried to copy (`dd`) the old partition into the new, bigger one (`dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/sda2`), but then the system would refuse to boot.

What I have not yet tried is creating manually a partition, then copying all the contents (with hfsplus-support on the linux live disk), because I suppose this partition would not boot either.

Is there a way to either resize the partition after having copied the entire disk, or to render the manually resized partition bootable ?

Answer: 
Just cleanly partition the new disk to any size you like and copy the data over with [Carbon Copy Cloner.](http://www.bombich.com/) It will be bootable and have the size you want. 

You can do that on a running system, and don't need any live cd's or anything, just an usb or firewire interface for the new/second harddisk.
I'll second the idea of just partitioning the drive as you want and copying the data. See [How to Create a Bootable Backup of Mac OS X](http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html) for various methods to do so.