The hard drive in my Mac Mini G4 is in a rough shape, so I plan to replace it with an mSATA SSD. The HDD contains both Mac OS and MorphOS partitions, and I'd like to retain this arrangement. What would be my best option to clone the contents of whole disk? Is this something can can be done while the HDD is still in the machine, e.g. with a PPC Linux Live CD?

I'm not sure if there are any special tricks to consider with SSD drives (like not writing to all cells which would happen when writing a whole image into it), but in theory it should work by making an image of the whole disk either with dd in Linux, RAWDISK: in MorphOS, or with similar solution.

Here's some documentation if you want to do it by booting from the MorphOS installation media (use the RegisterISO first, as a tip) http://library.morph.zone/Creating_Backups#Cloning_a_Partition_or_Hard_Disk_as_an_Image_File

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the RAWDISK method in MorphOS. That looks like the most convenient since I'll need a fresh installation disc anyway. Since it clones the whole disk I assume I won't need to do any blessings to make things bootable on the new drive.

I don't remember how those "blessings" work in this kind of situation... are they stored on the filesystem or in nvram? If in the filesystem, it shouldn't be an issue, but if in nvram or such, maybe it still would work if the partition setup is similar? Unless it stores more info about hd somewhere... but at least for MorphOS part it's easily fixable with HFSSetMacBoot if it becomes an issue.

"blessing" is only needed on the filesystem level, so if you do an exact/raw copy, it won't be needed again.