Solaris

The OP said that the drive is already available. If the drives are identical, I too would use a dd command. This will copy the partition table and the boot block. The 2nd drive will end up thinking it is the first drive. So you would need to switch drives to use it.

First, boot the install cd in single user mode. From the OK prompt:
boot cdrom -s

Then some command like:
dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2 bs=65536 of=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2

When this completes, power off, remove the first drive, move the 2nd drive to the first drives slot and reboot.

Perderabo - would you still need to run installboot to get the device bootable or does dd already satisfy this?

you don't need installboot after the dd.

Right. That is why we are using slice 2, devices that end in "s2". If your partition tables are correct, slice 2 is the entire user accessible disk. dd will make an exact copy of the disk. It is critical that the disks be the same model.

By the way, I once benchmarked various values for the bs= parameter and found that 65536 was optimal. Other values will slow you down.

Thats why because of precautions, checks and measures to be taken, ufsdump is much faster, easier and safer.

indeed

I must disagree. ufsdump works only with ufs filesystems. ufsrestore will not render a disk bootable, copy the partition table, or deal with any slices not containing ufs filesystems. A lot of analysis is needed to clone a disk piecemeal. If you really find a single dd command more complex than prtvtoc, fmthard, installboot, and several invocations of ufsdump and and newfs and ufsrestore, ok, I will take you at your word. But what if you have this task to perform on an HP-UX system, a Solaris system, an SCO system, and a Linux system. Each of these these systems needs a cloned root disk and each may or may not be partitioned and the partitions may or may not contain the local equivalent of a McKusick filesystem. Now which is easier? The dd is conceptually very easy and does not depend on intimate knowledge of the particular unix flavor or disk layout. This makes it attractive to someone without a great deal of Solaris knowledge... such as a person who might post the question in the first place.

If the disk is dominated by mostly empty ufs filesystems and/or the swap slice, then your way probably will be faster for larger disks. But for a 72 GB or smaller disk, like you might find on an old V480, you will need to hustle to beat the dd.