I wanted to upgrade my old 250GB WD Blue HDD to a newer 512GB Crucial SSD, but was having problems getting the data transfered over. I tried clonezilla to no avail probably probably because the HDD had sector size of 512 bytes and the SSD uses 4k bytes. In the end, I resorted to copying everything over manually. Here are the steps that I used For these steps /dev/sdX is the existing drive and /dev/sdZ is the new one, which became one letter less after the existing drive is removed (sdY).
Prequisites
- Have a linux live USB to be able to boot with
- Install grub-efi-amd64:
- sudo apt-get install grub-efi-amd64
Linux Live USB Steps
Boot off of your linux live USB so that the data on the drive you are copying is static.
Existing Partition Formats
Here is what my existing drive looks like, and I was going to keep the same structure.
- sdX1 - EFI - 512MiB - flags hidden
- sdX2 - root - 95.37GiB
- sdX3 - home - 129.48GiB
- sdX4 - swap - 7.54GiB
Create new partitions using gparted
Using gparted I created the following partitions. Description is not a field in gparted, but I listed it below for clarification.
- sdZ1
- description: EFI
- Free space preceding: 1MiB (This is the default that came up for me and from what I read should be used for aligning the physical sectors)
- size: 512MiB
- type: fat32
- flags: hidden, esd, boot
- sdZ2
- description: root
- size: 153,600MiB
- type: ext4
- sdZ3
- description: home
- size: 257,291MiB
- type: ext4
- sdZ4
- description: swap
- size: 65,536MiB (I went with 64GiB as the server has 20GiB of RAM and I am thinking of upgrading to 32GiB and this would put me at 2x of that)
- type: linux-swap
Mount
Mount all the drives to get ready to copy them
- sudo mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/hdd1
- sudo mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt/hdd2
- sudo mount /dev/sdX3 /mnt/hdd3
- sudo mount /dev/sdZ1 /mnt/ssd1
- sudo mount /dev/sdZ2 /mnt/ssd2
- sudo mount /dev/sdZ3 /mnt/ssd3
Copy the data
Description of rsync options:
- a - archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X)
- A - preserve ACLs (implies -p)
- H - preserve hard links
- X - preserve extended attributes
- x - don't cross filesystem boundaries (this is very important)
- v - increase verbosity
Perform the actual copies, depending on file size this can take a while.
- cd /mnt/hdd1
- sudo rsync -aAHXxv --stats --progress . /mnt/ssd1
- cd /mnt/hdd2
- sudo rsync -aAHXxv --stats --progress . --exclude={"dev/*","proc/*","sys/*","tmp/*","run/*","mnt/*","media/*","lost+found"} /mnt/ssd2
- cd /mnt/hdd3
- sudo rsync -aAHXxv --stats --progress . /mnt/ssd3 --exclude={"lost+found"}
Edit the UUIDs copied
Determine the new UUIDs to use
- sudo blkid /dev/sdZ2 # for /
- sudo blkid /dev/sdZ3 # for /home
- sudo blkid /dev/sdZ4 # for swap
- sudo vi /mnt/ssd2/etc/fstab
Replace the UUID for swap in initramfs resume
- sudo vi /mnt/ssd2/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
Change booting to use new drive
GRUB
- boot using old install
- sudo update-grub
- check /boot/grub/grub.cfg to ensure it is using the correct UUID for sdZ2
- boot using new install
- sudo mkdir /boot/efi
- sudo mount /dev/sdZ1 /boot/efi
- sudo grub install --target=x86_64-efi /dev/sdZ
- sudo update-grub
- shutdown
- remove old hd
- boot using new install
- sudo update-grub
Bonus Section
Because I did not get grub installed on the new drive before removing the old one, I got stuck at the grub prompt so the steps that I used to boot were:
- ls
- set root=(hd2,2)
- linux /boot/vmlinuz<tab complete to most recent version> root=/dev/sdY2
- initrd /boot/init<tab complete to same version as above>
- boot
TRIM
Ensure that trim is enabled and works:
- Check that it is enabled to run weekly
- systemctl status fstrim.timer
- Check that trimming actually works
- sudo fstrim -v /
Update 2022-07-26: NOATIME
As the ssd was seeing more writes then I would like, I realized that it was writing the access times, which I really didn't need. To fix this we add it in /etc/fstab to this line and then reboot:
- UUID=XXXX / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
Update 2023-02-03: Swappiness
Updated the swappiness setting to hopefully save more ssd writes
- in /etc/sysctl.conf add:
- vm.swappiness = 10
- reboot
- check the setting:
- cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
Sources
- https://newbedev.com/how-to-best-clone-a-running-system-to-a-new-harddisk-using-rsync
- https://ostechnix.com/backup-entire-linux-system-using-rsync/
- https://itectec.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-how-to-transfer-ubuntu-to-ssd-but-keeping-home-on-hdd/
- https://askubuntu.com/questions/1116778/how-to-set-the-resume-variable-to-override-these-issues
- https://www.howtogeek.com/449691/what-is-swapiness-on-linux-and-how-to-change-it/
- https://askubuntu.com/questions/103915/how-do-i-configure-swappiness
