I’ve tried looking for this a bit on the cool wide web, but they mostly seem to cover copying one partition after another onto a smaller drive. My situation is that I’m moving from a 256 GB SSD, to a larger 512 GB SSD. Everything is on this one drive. Bootloader, Windows and it’s partitions, and Linux and it’s partitions.
So I’m wondering if it’s possible to clone over the entirety of the drive, and expand a partition or two, without me having to reinstall REFIned/GRUB and set up all sorts of crap all over again? Preserving UUIDs and stuff, not confusing the BIOS about which drive to boot from? I just got my Arch install nice and settled and don’t really feel like going through the process all over again.
If this is possible with GParted, or some other basic linux tools, I’d live to hear about it! Or call me an idiot and link me to an obvious resource that I somehow didn’t know I should’ve looked at first. That’s fine too.
EDIT: dd worked like a charm! Here’s the command I used, if anyone finds this thread later, wondering about the same thing:
if and of are the input and output drives, change those to your desired drives. bs changes how large each block transfered at a time should be. The default is much smaller, making the transfer very slow.
I’m going to be honest and say I have no clue what the conv stuff does, hahah
And status=progress makes it so you can actually see what the fck is going on during the transfer.
dd should work fine. Just say if=/dev/sda instead of if=/dev/sda1 to get the drive instead of the partition. The Universally Unique IDentifers (UUID) will change by design, so that MAY be an issue, but it’s a little difficult to determine without knowing your exact setup.
Ah, using dd would be nice. I’ve seen people say that they’ve cloned drives and then had trouble because of duplicate UUIDs. However, that would be great for me, since I’m not planning on using the old drive at all after this!
Is there anything specific you would need to know to figure out if non-duplicate UUIDs would cause issues? I am using the UUIDs to point to drives in fstab etc.
You could plug in the new drives to find their UUID, put it in the fstab and comment out your current drives, but don’t reboot until everything is copied over. Then a reboot will magically mount your new drives and not your old drives
The disk has lots of partitions. Not just ext4. Everything Win10 has and everything my Arch install has. Which also leads me to another question that has come up…
That’s what’s on the drive. I’m dead certain there is a way to do this while maintaining the UUIDs.
However as I’m trying some things out in GParted while talking here, and I’m getting told that I can’t have more than 4 primary partitions on a drive, but I clearly can, since that drive right there has 7 of them. How come?
In such a situation, I would prepare a boot usb with acronis, and with its help I copied the disk to disk, sector per sector … The only thing you will need to do after that is gparted/MiniTool Partition Wizard and increase the partition you want for additional space.
I kept looking around, and I think I found out that dd doesn’t create new UUIDs and that that is a common problem when cloning drives with it. So I’m gonna give that a shot and see how it goes.
O’ lordy reavessm thank you for suggesting dd, it worked like a charm!
It also brought over the cache of what I had going on in the Linux install before the reboot, so all my work popped right back up again, hahah. I know that makes perfect sense, but it just caught me off guard, hahahah.
