Arch Linux

Coume

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2008-02-10

Posts: 78

Website

How to migrate my HDD to a smaller SSD?

Hello,

Here is my current partition scheme:

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1         122      979933+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2             123        6201    48829567+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            6202       12280    48829567+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda4           12281       30401   145556932+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           12281       29428   137741278+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6           29429       30401     7815591   82  Linux swap / Solaris

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              46G   23G   22G  51% /
udev                   10M  220K  9.8M   3% /dev
none                  1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             942M   39M  856M   5% /boot
/dev/sda5             130G   96G   27G  79% /home
/dev/sda3              46G  631M   43G   2% /mnt/windows

I want to migrate my HDD onto my 40GB SSD. I don't want to partition the 40GB SSD, I'd rather use a single partition on it.

Do I need to install Arch on the SSD and then copy the configuration over? Or can I move/copy /boot and / onto the SSD and have a fully functioning system straight away?

Any advice on how to do it will be more than welcome
Thanks
Ludo

fukawi2

Ex-Administratorino

From: .vic.au

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 6,224

Website

Re: How to migrate my HDD to a smaller SSD?

1. Boot a LiveCD (eg, Arch installer)
2. Mount all your current partitions to /old  (eg, /old/boot, /old/home etc)
3. Mount your SSD to /new (eg, /new/boot)
4. cp -ra /old /new
5. Edit /new/etc/fstab to suit your new partition layout
5. chroot into /new and run mkinitcpio -p kernel26 (not sure if this step is *needed* but it doesn't hurt)
6. Update your grub config and run grub-setup to install grub to your SSD

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ryeguy146

Member

Registered: 2009-10-28

Posts: 33

Re: How to migrate my HDD to a smaller SSD?

Sorry to hit up an old post, but is there any reason that this would not work for creating a USB based installation, if I were to perform the correct configuration to the mentioned files and install grub? This bootable USB would be used on a number of machines. Being as the installation process is the same, I'm not entirely sure what differences there would be between an SSD and HDD installation that would prohibit this.

Thanks

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,286

Re: How to migrate my HDD to a smaller SSD?

I don't see a reason why it should not work. It'll take you 20 minutes or so. Just try it and report back :-)

Cdh

Member

Registered: 2009-02-03

Posts: 1,098

Re: How to migrate my HDD to a smaller SSD?

In /etc/mkinitcpio.conf you probably need to put "usb" in the HOOKS=(...) array if you want to boot from usb.

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ryeguy146

Member

Registered: 2009-10-28

Posts: 33

Re: How to migrate my HDD to a smaller SSD?

Well, I agree that this should work well, but I've run into some issues. I've now built the system as I want it on a virtual computer, but am having some issues with formatting the drive. I built the partition table so that the /home directory would be NTFS or FAT32 (I've tried both), and therefore readable in Windows computers (others are ext4 and ext2). This doesn't seem to work, and attempting to mount the partition in Windows 7 prompts me to format it. I'm blaming Windows for this behavior for now, but will have to eventually solve it. The more pressing issue is that when attempting to boot from the device, I'm told that the boot partition is either invalid or damaged, no matter my partition style or tool used. I did check to make sure that the /boot partition was flagged as bootable.

Viewing the partition table in either cfdisk or gparted shows everything as perfect. Fdisk complains about the partitions not ending on cylinder boundaries. I'm not sure if this is the issue, but I'm assuming that it is what's causing the issue. I solved the problem by simply going through the arch setup and making a usual installation to the usb device and overwriting it with the installation that I had prepared in virtualbox. Everything now works wonderfully. The partition tables appear exactly as they did when I created them in the other devices, but cfdisk in the arch setup context seems to do the trick.

It isn't overly important, but I'd love to hear ideas as to what I did wrong.

Last edited by ryeguy146 (2010-12-31 19:55:00)