If you do a dd from one drive to another it's going to create a partition that's 9GB on the other drive, right? That's probably not what you want. I'd just install and mount the new drive, and cp -a from the old drive to the new. It's guaranteed to work, for one thing, whereas dd is not. (If you're copying a bunch of Linux stuff to a new drive too, be careful trying to copy /dev or /proc or anything like that. It probably won't copy properly.)

You should not be using the DRI module if you're using NVidia's driver. I doubt this is causing your problems however. Yes, "nv" is the default xorg driver and "nvidia" is the on from NVidia; you should generally use "nvidia".

Check /var/log/Xorg.log or wherever the logs are stored on your system.