[kwlug-disc] Cloning smaller to larger SSDs (Clonezilla/Gparted)

[Chris Irwin]

I've done it a few times. I do the same 'dd' method mentioned above,
usually from a Live USB stick, so I don't have to worry about mounted
filesystems. I do this for both Linux and Windows drives (I just did my
Windows 10 machine last week from an SSD to a NVMe drive).

dd'ing the disk ensures your partition UUIDs don't change, which means you
won't have to worry about re-registering UEFI bootloaders. Just don't boot
with both disks connected, because you can't be sure which you'll be
running from. Best is to remove the old disk after copying. Wipe the disk
at a later date (I do it on a different machine, although there shouldn't
be any issues with duplicate UUIDs once everything is mounted).

Next steps would vary depending on your filesystems. You can then resize
your partitions. I use LVM, and I just carefully delete the current
partition, and create one with the same starting to fill the rest of the
disk using parted, then `pvresize` and I'm good to use that space as
needed. There are tools that can automate that (I think parted itself can),
but I prefer manually doing it.

I also manually run `fstrim -av` afterwards to give free space back to the
SSD's garbage collector, since `dd` will have copied free space from the
original disk. This is likely already a scheduled weekly task (at least it
is on Fedora), but no issue in being proactive.

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 8:29 AM Charles M <chaslinux at gmail.com> wrote:

> The short version:
>
> I'm planning on upgrading the 120GB OS SSD in our KODI server to a
> 500GB+ SSD. Can I simply using Clonezilla and Gparted to clone and
> resize the data or will I have to do some grub magic? (I assume I will
> because of the UUID system)
>
> The long version:
>
> I want to upgrade the 120GB SSD in our KODI server to a 500GB+ SSD.
> 120GB was good when we were only scraping movie data, but now we've
> started using it for Steam and some of those Steam games take more
> than 60% of the current SSD. We don't want to move the /home folder to
> the spinning rust drive.
>
> One problem that prevents us from simply doing a fresh install of the
> latest Xubuntu and copying over is the fact that lirc is broken in
> 18.04. When I did the upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04 on our current box I
> held back the lirc package so our remotes would continue to work. I
> could reinstall 16.04 and do the same upgrade-hold-back process for
> 18.04.
>
> I don't really want to add the 500GB as a slave to the 120GB (keeping
> things simple).
>
> Has anyone cloned SSD to SSD or does everyone mostly backup and reinstall?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Charles
> --
> Charles McColm
> Blog: http://www.charlesmccolm.com/
> Twitter/Identica/Google+: @chaslinux
>
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-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>
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