The author doesn't seem to be very clear on why dd didn't work. Perhaps he was trying t partition the new drive and then use dd on the individual partitions?

The author doesn't seem to be very clear on why dd didn't work. Perhaps he was trying t partition the new drive and then use dd on the individual partitions? I'm guessing the one thing he didn't try was using dd on the raw devices themselves, rather than the paritions. This would throw away the additional space of the larger drive, but should serve well as a last-ditch "there's no way this can fail" measure.