Tech Tips: Copying Linux HDD to a new SSD

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

Replace the UUIDs in fstab (NOT PARTUUID) for / and /home and 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

Tech Tips

23 December 2021

Copying Linux HDD to a new SSD