New HDD

[pete smout]

Hi all,

I have brought a new HDD for my laptop, and I want to install 13.10
(saucy) onto it, the problem starts that my DVD burner is on the fritz,
and I cannot get my lappy to boot from USB stick!

So I was wondering if there is a way of installing it to the new drive
via USB (I own a USB HDD caddy), Unetbootin does not recognize the HDD
caddy and startup disk creator does not create a bootable HDD!

Failing this is there a way of 'cloneing' my current HDD onto the new
one so I can then upgrade from 13.04 to 13.10?

Steps I have taken so far:

Downloaded the latest (& greatest?) .iso from Ubuntu & checked the MD5 sum
plugged in the HDD caddy into the USB port and put new HDD into the
caddy and fired up unetbootin, the only option given is '/' which I take
to mean my current root dir (am I correct in this assumption?)

So I tried (against my better judgement) the 'Start-up Disk Creator'
this at least gives the option of installing to the drive located in the
caddy, even if the result is un-bootable!

Unetbootin does recognize my flash stick when that is plugged into the
USB port and successfully  installs a bootable iso to the stick, but the
machine will not boot from USB flash drive (options given in BIOS are
USB CD or USB FDD, neither of which will boot from flash drive!) this
makes me wonder if the mount locations are different for USB sticks than
they are for USB HDD and unetbootin is "looking" in the wrong place?

Any advice greatfully received

TIA

Peter S