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For my personal workstation, it's such a rare thing I always use that an excuse to start from scratch again. If it's like a business system or something, usually build a new system and migrate data and services to it gradually.
I so rarely do in-place upgrades of system drives unless it's a recovery or something.
Pretty much this. I’d copy anything I want to keep onto a temporary drive, (cloud storage, a USB drive, second SSD, etc), then use it as an excuse to refresh my install. Then just copy everything from that temporary storage.
True. Starting with a fresh install can be more of a performance boost than buying a new drive. Add them together though and your computer is going to feel like future tech. I'd also just reinstall, unless its a server or a pain to rebuild.
`btrfs device add /dev/newdrive /
btrfs device remove /dev/olddrive`
Last time I did this I used btrfs.
Add the new drive to the system, create partitions, add the new volume and then remove the old one, btrfs moves all the blocks to the new drive.
The ESP partition is small enough and FAT- enough to just use cp.
Huh.
I never thought of using that feature of btrfs that way. Brilliant.
Yeah, I think i'll give this a go
I would add that a slightly better way would be to do it in raid1 mode instead of single mode.
That way you can move the data over by running a balance, instead of by removing the old volume, which would survive the process being interrupted by a reboot or whatever else.
Then after the balance you can remove the old volume and turn the new one back into a single volume.
disk destroyer? I prefer just formatting and rsync-ing things. Unless I care about preserving metadata.
rsync -a ftw
I usually use rsync -avHXS --numeric-ids --progress --delete
Anything important is already stored elsewhere, so I just install clean.
Pretty much this... although I usually have at least a few moments of paranoia thinking about what I might be about to lose.
Adjust partition size if neccessary, then cp /dev/sda /dev/sdb.
Clonezilla Live USB ftw
I use a decent cloning tool like foxclone, dd isn't really the right tool for that kind of thing IMO.
I always use dd or ddrescue. Takes 20min to open the computer, connect the drives, boot from usb, copy everything and you'd be done. Also super easy. Just pay a lot of attention before hitting enter. One small letter and you copy it the wrong way around. Or make other mistakes and overwrite your old drive.
I usually use Clonezilla. It works for local drives, but it can also clone a drive over the network by running it on both ends, which is very useful for remote servers (eg moving a VPS to a different location).
Honestly dd is perfect. Like you say, shrink the partition down first, DD to the new disc, swap discs. That's it.
Reinstalling because I use ZFS.
There's a way to do it without shrinking the partition and dd until last used block.
I use this to copy my Linux setup for a nas down to a 4 gig ISO for redeploy.
Have to check my notes...
Edit: Checked Notes
#Use-case of fdisk taking the approach that fdisk is used, and assumption is your "sudo fdisk -l "produced:
Disk /dev/sda: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000e4b5
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 27 209920 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 27 525 4000768 5 Extended
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5 27 353 2621440 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 353 405 416768 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 405 490 675840 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 490 525 282624 83 Linux
The two things you should take note of are
In this case you have cylinders that are equal to 8225280 Bytes. In the "End" column sda8 terminates at 525 (which is 525[units]16065512 = ~4.3GB)
dd can do a lot of things, such as starting after an offset, or stopping after a specific number of blocks. We will do the latter using the count option in dd. The command would appear as follows:
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/your_directory/image_name.iso bs=8225280 count=526
Where -bs is the block size (it is easiest to use the unit that fdisk uses, but any unit will do so long as the count option is declared in these units), and count is the number of units we want to copy Note that we increment the count by 1 to capture the last block).
Note to display units in cylinders: fdisk -l -u=cylinders /dev/sda
Note for newbies of dd that of= can be a device you write to i.e. /dev/sdc, rather than a path to an iso image.
I have a bunch of scripts to install my systems. Anything important is already backed up to my storage system.
Do you use any fancy tools like Ansible or just a series of bash scripts?
For my laptop and desktop, it's just a bash script. For my home-lab, it's a config-management system that I built using bash scripts.
rsync
Out of curiosity, what are you doing that the difference between the two is woth that effort? Or is the pcie3 drive bottom of the barrel maybe?
Yeah, exactly the latter. I noticed the other day that the thin copper layer that sits across the top of this drive had just popped off!