(I think the answer is yes, but I'd like to be certain before I actually do it!)
What I'm trying to do: install a new sd card in my "rooted" Android phone that uses A2SD. The fact that it's an Android system is irrelevant to the question I'm asking, though.
If you don't know what A2SD is, there's a good (but long) explanation here. Essentially, and for the purposes of my question, symbolic links are being created from the system to an ext2/3/4 partition on the sd card to conserve internal disk space.
Normally, one would go about switching SD cards by doing a nandroid+ext backup, which is an image of the phone's internal storage + the ext partition. However, for reasons I've yet to determine (I'm awaiting a good answer on another forum), I can only create the basic nandroid backup (i.e., I can't image the ext partition). Based on my Googling, I'm not confident that I'll be able to image this partition before I switch the SD cards. Therefore, I'm looking at a workaround.
I have copied the entire contents of my ext partition to my computer. I will be partitioning the new card with gparted. When I move the contents to the new card, the file structure will be exactly the same. In other words, the paths to the target files/directories will be the same as before. BUT the physical location/address/whatever of each file will have changed. From what I understand of symbolic links, because it stores the path and not an address, and because the path won't be altered, all the links should remain intact.
Is this correct?