Migrating MX18 from one SSD to another

[WarhawkCZ]

Thank you everyone, I will try the snapshot feature first. It is for a collectible Thinkpad x301 (my portable typewriter) and the amount of home data is super small. I'll report back.

In that case, and if your USB stick is 8GB or larger, a simple personal snapshot with no directories in /home excluded will probably do everything that you need. Create the snapshot ISO (by default they get stored in /home/snapshot), right-click on the md5 and sha512 files and select "Check data integrity" and if that says "OK" burn it to your USB stick using MX Live USB Maker, boot from the USB just to check that it includes your personal setup, power off and swap out the SSDs, boot from the USB again, and install to the new bigger SSD. VIola!

Jesus, this was smooth as silk. Process has just finished, zero problems. Even notes on my desktop remained in the position.
Utterly boring distro, no problems to deal with...

[JayM]

Utterly boring distro, no problems to deal with...

Careful! That can lead to messing up your system out of sheer boredom because everything works so well, leaving you with nothing else to do. :)

[jj1j1]

Clonezilla easily and reliably takes care of all steps and will not allow cloning a larger disk to a smaller, so it is safe in this instance.

I used to use Clonezilla often. There's an option in advanced settings that allows use of smaller drives as long as the clone data will fit on the smaller drive as Clonezilla doesn't copy empty space of larger drive.

[nathan2423]

Since my question is very similar can I add this here?

I am about to migrate two of my computers this weekend from existing spinning hard drives to SSDs. Both of the old drives are in the 300gb size range with multiple partitions (root, home, data drive, swap), and the new SSDs are larger than the old drives.

I presume that booting from a live USB which has clonezilla is the best way to do that, while attaching the new SSD to an external enclosure temporarily. then use clonezilla disk to disk clone.

The reason I post this is that I ***always*** seem to have a devil of a time using Clonezilla. Rarely if ever do I seem to accomplish anything when I set out to use it, as the result almost uniformly ends up unbootable. And I then end up using the snapshot facility and then copying data separately and kick myself for trying Clonezilla in the first place.

Are there any "tricks" to using Clonezilla successfully that might help make this attempt more successful?

[chrispop99]

(Offered as a future reference point).

mSATA to USB adaptors are available, so it would be possible to have both disks active simultaneously.

Chris

[Vincent17]

@nathan2423 FWIW I recently migrated a HDD to SSD (same size). Tried direct copy using dd, cat, ddrescue and clonezilla, but all of them failed or hung. What worked was to make an image on a third drive with ddrescue and dd that to the SSD.
--Edit-- Clarification: I booted MX from live flash drive and tried to copy internal HDD to new SSD in usb external drive enclosure. Also tried clonezilla live flash drive.

[baldyeti]

@nathan: clonezilla has this nice ability to copy a drive to a bigger one, to scale. IOW, if you copy a 320GB HDD to a 512GB SSD, every partition gets its size multiplied by (512/320) and its content copied. Neat. I have not tried this in a long time and it was on a MBR-partitioned drive running windows XP. Clonezilla was then able to fix the NT bootloader. Not sure if this still works with GPT and Windows 10. If your source drive is linux only, i'd got for it. If needed you can always fix grub using "MX boot repair".

[m_pav]

Are there any "tricks" to using Clonezilla successfully that might help make this attempt more successful?

If you haven't already, just try using the defaults, or if you need to be ultra-careful for fear of trashing your data, clone the entire disk to an image and use the resultant image as your source when doing an image dump back to a new disk.

My data is something like 670GB in size on a 1.6 TB partition, so it's not beneficial to use clonezilla. I simply have a luckybackup profile that takes care of saving my data to a removable USB HDD and I do a fresh install and do not format /home. I would follow by dumping the data back when I upgrade my drive, but for tiny installations, say 10-30GB, I'd definitely use clonezilla.

[jj1j1]

I use an older version of clonezilla, clonezilla-live-2.4.5-23-amd64. The interface is easier to work with, (for me anyway).
I helped a friend once trying to clone his laptop to a new ssd. It seemed to me that the bios wanted a specific number of partitions and for them to be a specific size. It wouldn't even let laptop boot into Clonezilla. It wouldn't boot into larger, fully partitioned, ssd. After getting exact size of each partition, cloning drive, re creating the exact partition structure on new ssd, and leaving unused space as unallocated, I could run Clonezilla, and it copied correctly, bios was happy, and it booted properly. After it booted I partitioned the unalocated space.

[nathan2423]

Thanks for the replies. Sounds like i am not the only one having problems with clonezilla.

It's kind of mysterious to me - I have read so much praise for it, but it seems much more finicky than it should be.

I would think if the new disk is going to be completely reformated by the cloning process, there would not be so much issue and it wouldn't be so difficult.

I am much more impressed with the interface of qt4fsarchiver, and i see that it has a clone hd option, but I wasn't able to get that working on last try either.

I will see if I can devote some time to playing with both options and report back.