depends on if you copy over the partition table as well iirc. For this to work you'll have to have the /etc/fstab file be defined using UUIDs, not disk names. you can do this with something like:

dd if=/dev/mycurrentdrive of=/dev/newdrive bs=10M

reinstalling the bootloader isn't hard though, just make sure you know if your system is configured to boot via bios or uefi