Moving install to new drive

[ex-Gooserider]

My machine is currently using a SATA SSD, but I have just added a new NVMe SSD which should be slightly faster (I hope) I'd like to move my Debian install from the SSD to the new drive. If it matters, the machine is an early generation I-7 desktop.

I am currently running on Trixie with a lot of added software installed, including some compiled from source with a lot of dependencies. Because of this, I'd MUCH rather move everything over instead of just installing from scratch. Searching has found a few suggestions to use Clonezilla, but if I understand the docs on it correctly, the target drive must be the same size or bigger than the destination. Both drives are nominally 1TB, but the KDE partition manager says the SSD is bigger by a few GiB. The SSD is 953.86 GiB, and the NVMe drive is 921.51 GiB, is this enough of a difference to keep Clonezilla from working? (The SSD is not terribly full, probably on the order of 60-70%) I also have the SSD split up into multiple separate partitions, so I don't think the other solution I've seen of using rsync would work easily...

What is the best way to make this move happen? Pointers to other references are welcome, I don't mind reading the manual...

[FreewheelinFrank]

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[Aki]

Hello,
I would suggest to take a look at (see answers about clonezilla, too):

• How to clone to a smaller harddisk

Hope this helps.

---
note: moved to "General Questions" sub-forum.

[wizard10000]

Moved to Testing and Unstable.

[oswaldkelso]

I just cloned my 80GB drive to a 160GB drive then resized in to the extra space with gparted. I then swapped the drives keep the 80GB as backup. Then I found a 500GB drive in a dodgy external usb hub and cloned that and resized it as well.

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb status=progress 

Where sda is the existing drive and sdb is the new one be sure you get the naming right or you will loose your data!

[ex-Gooserider]

Thank you AKI, I missed that option in the docs... However I found it doesn't totally make it easy, as it failed initially, because I had the source drive fully partitioned, so it failed on writing the last partition to the new (smaller) drive... I solved this by rebooting w/ System Rescue CD, and shrinking the /home partition w/ gparted, so that the total space of all the partitions was less than the new drive's size. Clonezilla then worked when I set the -icds flag, and copied the drive.

However I found that when I pulled the SSD source drive and rebooted, that my system is not able to boot off the NVMe drive. I shouldn't have been surprised by this considering that NVMe didn't exist when my machine was made....

Presumably the best solution for this is to leave the SSD as the boot drive, and point all the other directories at the NVMe drive, I just have to figure out how to do this...

ex-Gooserider

[Aki]

Hello,

[..]
when I pulled the SSD source drive and rebooted, that my system is not able to boot off the NVMe drive. I shouldn't have been surprised by this considering that NVMe didn't exist when my machine was made....
[..]

This is a boot loader problem caused by UEFI booting, isn't it? If this is confirmed, you can follow the instructions here:

• https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI

[pbear]

Be aware the OP has opened a separate thread about the boot topic. In fairness, it really is a different question from the one asked in this thread.

[ex-Gooserider]

Hello,

[..]
when I pulled the SSD source drive and rebooted, that my system is not able to boot off the NVMe drive. I shouldn't have been surprised by this considering that NVMe didn't exist when my machine was made....
[..]

This is a boot loader problem caused by UEFI booting, isn't it? If this is confirmed, you can follow the instructions here:

• https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI

As Pbear has mentioned, I have started a separate thread about the boot question, as it seemed like a different issue... In that thread, he says it looks like I'm using GPT w old style BIOS, so not a UEFI problem, maybe... It seems to be an open question, as I have just looked in the BIOS settings, and it says to attempt to do a UEFI boot, and switch to Legacy BIOS boot if that fails... When I boot off a Bookworm install DVD, it usually comes up with the BIOS install menu, but has come up with the UEFI menu at least once... Since my understanding is that UEFI is really only needed / helpful for disks over 2TB, and I don't have any of those, seems like it might be better to change the boot setting to just use legacy bios?

ex-Gooserider