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DCengineer

Member

Registered: 2015-12-11

Posts: 15

Upgrade to SSD

Hello all,

I have recently ordered an SSD for my Toshiba Satellite laptop, which currently has an HDD. My configuration is fairly complicated, and I intend to use the hardware encryption provided in the new drive. Here are the questions I have...

• What parts of the root (@) subvolume can be safely transferred? If possible, I would like to copy all of my installed applications and most of my current configuration over. For instance, I would like to keep my current subvolume layout. Basically, I want to create a new /boot, mkinitcpio, and fstab, but leave all of the userspace applications and systemctl services in their current state.

• I want to install the new system, but leave everything userspace-related the same. Is this possible?

• Would it be better to "nuke it from orbit?" In other words: reinstall everything, and copy only the configuration files I need?

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,253

Re: Upgrade to SSD

When I switched I simply rsync cloned the spinner to the SSD and fixed up grub and /etc/fstab to boot from it. No problems at all.

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus Prime B450 Plus, 32Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (1 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

DCengineer

Member

Registered: 2015-12-11

Posts: 15

Re: Upgrade to SSD

The difference is that my current system uses software encryption while my new one will use hardware encryption. This means that my new configuration will not use LVM or a separate /boot partition. The reason I asked this question is because I'm not just doing a simple "copy everything" operation. I will be changing things that are normally only changed during installation.

frostschutz

Member

Registered: 2013-11-15

Posts: 1,417

Re: Upgrade to SSD

> This means that my new configuration will not use LVM or a separate /boot partition.

That's fine, you can change your partitions, layout, filesystems, etc. everything as you see fit. Reinstalling from scratch because of such changes is usually not necessary.

In a live environment, mount your old stuff to /mnt/old/ - same as you'd do when chrooting into it, but leave out proc sys dev shm run.

Create the new structure as you see fit and mount it to /mnt/new/

And then just rsync -a /mnt/old/. /mnt/new/.

Or if not rsync do something similar with btrfs send - I'm not familiar with btrfs so I can't advise here.

Suppose your old structure had filesystems in /mnt/old/{boot,var,opt} and the new one has /mnt/new/{home}, things will still end up in the right place - provided there is enough room for all the files.

Once the system is copied then you can mount dev proc sys stuff to /mnt/new/ and chroot into it and fixer upper your bootloader, fstab and other configs and see if it boots.

Of course if you want to make a clean new fresh install no matter what you can do that too. It's up to you.