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Moving entire Linux installation to another drive

I have Ubuntu 14.04 with a lot of packages and work related stuff that I am very happy with it. It is installed on my main SSD drive which is a
120GB one (I had choosen "/" when I installed ubuntu, so I beleive everything should be on this drive). It shows up as /dev/sda

Now I have added another SSD to my computer which is a 240Gb. I do not have any other storage media at hand at the moment (e.g.
external hard drive).

Since the new 240GB drive has obviously more capacity and is faster (a newer generation than my 120GB one), I want to move my Linux to
this new drive. This new drive shows up as /dev/sdb and at the moment it is not formatted or anything (I have literally unpackaged and
inserted in my PC right now :P)

How can I safely move my linux installation to the new drive?

I can change the SATA cable so the new drive shows as /dev/sda if necessary.

This is the output of "fdisk -l" if that helps:

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00076d7a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 * 2048 226064383 113031168 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 226066430 234440703 4187137 5 Extended
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5 226066432 234440703 4187136 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 240.1 GB, 240057409536 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 29185 cylinders, total 468862128 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table

backup dd

edited Mar 13 '16 at 14:48 asked Mar 3 '16 at 18:43

Braiam Saeid87
45.2k 17 115 187 490 2 12 29

3 It sounds like you're planning to use both of them now. If so, you should consider just using the newer, bigger one as
/home instead of the entire system. It should be an easier change (just move everything over and add a single line
to /etcs/fstab), and most large files are likely to go into your home directory (and so onto the larger disk). Kevin Mar
3 '16 at 21:56

Possible duplicate of How to move Ubuntu to an SSD David Foerster Mar 14 '16 at 7:33

4 Answers

You can use CLONEZILLA for this purpose.

Clonezilla is a free partition and disk imaging/cloning tool which can be used to backup all your
data (whole disks or partitions) in a highly compressed way and later clone it back to your hard
disk to get it into exact same condition. This is faster than installing the OS most of the times.

Download Clonezilla stable ISO or Direct Download clonezilla-live-2.4.6-25-amd64.iso

Make a bootable (Live) USB using Tuxboot 7.0.

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9/26/2017 backup - Moving entire Linux installation to another drive - Ask Ubuntu
Boot from the created Clonezilla media.
Now you have many options :
1. Create an image of only '/' (saveparts) and clone it to any partition of your other SDD.
2. Create an image of the full disk (savedisk) and clone it to your new SSD.

In your case you can use the "device-device" option too, but I am not familiar with it.

You can find a detailed guide about Clonezilla here : http://clonezilla.org

edited Jun 2 '16 at 18:39 answered Mar 3 '16 at 19:12

Severus Tux
4,270 3 19 75

1 I suggest you watch these two tutorial videos before : youtube.com/watch?v=41tTudaQb0I and youtube.com/watch?
v=LS6VhLDw-io Severus Tux Mar 3 '16 at 19:15

This is also a good option. But I am too lazy to create the clonezilla stick ;-) Pilot6 Mar 3 '16 at 19:15

I found clonezilla didn't copy over mbr so a whole disk image and a bit of worked with gparted should do the trick
adampski Mar 4 '16 at 10:39

1 wow! glad to hear this ;-) , The boot time, It is because of changed UUIDs , i.e, The new UUIDs and Old ones of your
important partitions (home,Swap) has chamged. To correct this, please follow the instructions given here with
suitable changes : askubuntu.com/a/737340/497359 If you find any problem, please comment it. Severus Tux
Mar 4 '16 at 13:52

1 @adampski : This seems to be a bug in Clonezilla 2.4.5. As a workaround you can use Clonezilla 2.4.2 or Clonezilla
2.4.2 Server Edition (DRBL) until it is fixed. :) cl-netbox Mar 4 '16 at 14:24

It can be done in a few ways. But the easiest one is to just copy all files from the old drive to
the new one.

1. Create an ext4 partition and a swap partition on the new drive.

2. Boot from LiveUSB.
3. Mount the old Ubuntu partition to some directory, mount the new one to some other
directory.
4. Copy all files from the old one to the new one using cp -a command.
5. Install grub to the new drive.
6. Update /etc/fstab with new UUIDs.

If something is not clear, I can add some explanations.

edited Apr 13 at 12:25 answered Mar 3 '16 at 18:53

Community Pilot6
1 43.9k 14 79 149

So all files, groups and stuff would remain intact? Saeid87 Mar 3 '16 at 18:57

Right, cp -a preserves everything. Pilot6 Mar 3 '16 at 18:57

@Saeid87 Forgot about fstab . Added that too. Pilot6 Mar 3 '16 at 19:03

1 +1 - it's also possible to avoid booting from a LiveUSB and do everything while booted from the original drive, do all
the changes, reboot, voila. Sergey Mar 8 '16 at 20:17

1 @tienne: Do not copy those directories (also /dev ), simply create empty dirs on the destination drive and set the
same owner/permissions on them as they had on the source drive. Sergey yesterday

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9/26/2017 backup - Moving entire Linux installation to another drive - Ask Ubuntu

In case you have some time and want to go safe:

$ dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=64K conv=noerror,sync

Explanation of the command:

if is the input, of the destination

bs sets the block size. It's the size of the chunks dd will read and write in. Higher Chunk
sizes usually means higher performance but also more corruption of data if input disk has
errors, see here: archwiki on dd
noerror continues in r/w-errors.
sync synchronizes the offsets if an error has occured.

This will basically create an image of you disk sda and write it onto sdb (same partition layout
etc.) Ofcourse this'll write the whole 120GB as it's file-agnostic. Thus very safe, but not the
fastest, if you only use small portions of the disk. However if the input disk is rather full it might
even be faster.

BUT:

After that you probably want to resize the partitions as otherwise you cannot take
advantage of the extra space.
In any case it might be needed to edit the /etc/fstab file.
This is the case if Hardware-IDs are used to recognize the disks.

edited Mar 4 '16 at 11:25 answered Mar 3 '16 at 23:48

larkey
366 2 11

2 Your dd command will run forever. Consider adding bs=1M to it Dmitry Grigoryev Mar 4 '16 at 11:07

Afaik blocksize doesn't need to be 1M on SSDs but I'll look up on this and update larkey Mar 4 '16 at 11:09

The limitation is not in the SSD technology, but in bs default value which is 512 bytes. Dmitry Grigoryev Mar 4 '16
at 11:13

1 extended answer with bs, thanks for the heads-up larkey Mar 4 '16 at 11:25

1 Thanks for detailed answer...I learned some stuff! but I decided to go with clonezilla and resize the partitions
afterwards. Saeid87 Mar 4 '16 at 12:26

The way i do it when i switch to a new HDD is:

create the partition layout i want on the new drive

boot from live cd/usb or install, rescue etc.
mount the old hard disk partition(s) to be copied to, say,
/mnt/a
mount the new hard disk partition(s) to receive files to,
say /mnt/b
cp -a or use tar to copy the files from /mnt/a to /mnt/b
install boot loader (lilo or grub) on new disk
update the /etc/fstab
reboot and test if everything is ok

answered Mar 8 '16 at 17:24

delt
109 3

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