[CentOS] Need a Centos 6 USB hard drive recovery procedure

[Rock]

On Sat, 11 May 2013 21:27:59 +1000, Anthony K wrote:

>  I'd suggest you still make a copy of the disk with dd and 
> work on the image!

Since I may only get one shot, and since I've never formatted
a USB hard drive, nor ever even mounted one, how does this procedure 
look for my 149GB NTFS disk?

Note:
Recuva says the cluster size = 4096 & file record size = 1024.

0. {should I boot off a Centos CD or should I use my normal OS?}
1. Connect the new >=150GB hard drive to the Centos 6 laptop
Note: Presumably that will be on /dev/sda0 (right?)
2. Format the new hard drive with fdisk (is this step needed?)
Note: What fdisk command is recommended?
3. Connect the old 150GB compromised USB NTFS disk to Centos 6
5. Copy data, verbatim, from the old disk to the new disk with dd

Key questions:
Q0. Should I boot to my normal Centos 6 OS?
Q1: Should I format the new USB hard disk with Fdisk?
Q2: What dd command should I use?

Googling, and looking at fdisk options, should I run?
# fdisk /dev/sdb
# fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Googling, I find multiple dd examples {which block size should I use?}
# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
# dd if=/dev/sda of=mbrbackup bs=512 count=1; dd if=mbrbackup of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1