Can I move to a bigger disk without reinstalling?

imargonis · 2022-11-13 22:53:00

Hi,
I am thinking to switch my boot disk with a bigger ssd (old one is also ssd).

On this disk I have 4 partitions. 2 for windows (I don't even remember when I last used it) and 2 for Arch. I have the /boot and '/' (root) folders there. I have /home, /var, /swap (and various other partitions) on other disk(s).

Is there a way to just move the whole installation to a bigger ssd disk (current disk ~120GB, have not decided on size of new disk)?

(To be honest I am not sure I need the bigger size, I just want to install an ssd on an old laptop and I prefer to use the new disk for my main PC and use the old one for the laptop.)

Trilby · 2022-11-13 22:57:48

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Migrat … w_hardware

But note that 120GB for /boot and / with /home and /var elsewhere is obscenely large. If those other partitions are not also on a SSD, you may want to put them on the new one instead of keeping them on a HDD.

imargonis · 2022-11-14 22:42:36

Thank you for your answer.
I must admit the link you posted is a little intimidating, not the easiest thing to follow for me. Anyway I will try to make sense of it.

Just a note. My current drive has a named capacity of ~120GB but is in practice just over 110GB. Then ~70GB are taken up by windows. So I have essentially just over 40GB for / (/boot is just 100MB). Of which almost 30GB are used.

In a bigger drive I would consider to add /var. My /home is currently too big but maybe I have stuff in there that could be somewhere else. Also, is an ssd drive a good place to have a /swap partition? I guess it would be faster but is it bad for the health of the drive?

Trilby · 2022-11-15 02:05:41

40GB for / (root) is in a more common range - that's still far more than I'd ever need, but it's certainly reasonable. But if you are getting a bigger disk *and* getting rid of windows (or not copying windows at least) then it may be worth considering keeping /home on the ssd. There are a lot of benefits to speed in having (most of) /home on an ssd as there are a lot of small frequently read files (configs, rc files, user data, etc). If you have a lot of large media under home, these could be on another disk (and mounted at ~/media or ~/videos or ~/really_not_porn or whatever).

For swap, I'm not entirely sure. Pretty much all concerns about drive health due to read/write cycles on an SSD have not been relevant for any SSD made within the past decade or so. I'm pretty sure this holds true for swap on an SSD as well, but I've not used swap in about a decade myself so I've not really kept up on that topic.

For the wiki link, I probably should have linked to the anchor for section 3 as that's what you need - you can skip the rest. In fact you can likely skip much of section 3. You need 3.1 - 3.3 and maybe 3.4, but 3.5 and on is not relevant here.

Arch Linux

#1 2022-11-13 22:53:00

Can I move to a bigger disk without reinstalling?

#2 2022-11-13 22:57:48

Re: Can I move to a bigger disk without reinstalling?

#3 2022-11-14 22:42:36

Re: Can I move to a bigger disk without reinstalling?

#4 2022-11-15 02:05:41

Re: Can I move to a bigger disk without reinstalling?

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