On Tuesday, November 08, 2011 02:02:14 PM you wrote:

> 2.  using dd and an external USB drive enclosure that mounts an external 
> drive as /dev/sdX for some X, clone the drive from my wife's machine to 
> this drive.  As I only have a USB 2 interface on the enclosure, and 
> neither her nor my laptop has USB 3 ports, this dd will take 
> approximately 24 hours.

Use your eSATA port; the 8530p's specification page lists one.  This will be much much faster than USB2; 320GB shouldn't take more than three or four hours using something like ddrescue booted off a LiveCD and using a Thermaltake BLACX eSATA dock.  I've used eSATA (using an ExpressCard eSATA interface) for cloning my laptop's drive for a couple of years, now.  Makes a great deal of difference.

I'm not sure whether the SL 6.1 LiveCD includes ddrescue or not.  I use ddrescue for a couple of reasons; first, it provides a progress indication without having to send the dd process a SIGUSR1 from another shell; second, it intelligently blocks and can be some faster than dd.

Otherwise your procedure doesn't look unreasonable.