Thanks, Ralph and Andrew.
To add to what Ralph said, if the disk uses GUID Partition Table (GPT)
then after the clone the backup GPT - which was at the end of the
original disk - will now be in the middle. GParted should detect and fix
this automatically, otherwise gdisk can do it.
You could use Clonezilla instead of dd, which is designed for the task,
although you'll still have to expand the partition with something like
GParted afterwards.
https://clonezilla.org/
Clonezilla is faster as it only clones areas of the filesystems which
actually contain data, but that probably doesn't matter for a one-off clone.
A good point. dd(1) obviously doesn't do that. I had an idea GParted
could when copying a partition because it could use an external
filesystem-specific program to do the copy but browsing
https://gparted.org suggests I'm wrong.
Copying only the important bits is a useful optimisation and it's been
used by many over the years. But I always wonder ?If it goes wrong for
me, how many years pass before I find the end of some file is missing??.
Then I go for dd and copy all the bits, even the ?unused? ones. 🙂
I did the copy with dd; seems OK but slow - 6 hours. I extended the partition
over the whole SSD with gparted.
The good news:
The speed up for reading was as good as I hoped:
Task HDD SSD
From boot to logged in 166s 35s
Load Visual Studio Code 80s 9s
Load OpenOffice Calc 40s 9s
I didn't create a good test of write speed. I saved a big spreadsheet but that
didn't speed up. I suppose buffering could be at work.
The bad news:
I do have a partition table issue. gdisk says:
Partition table scan:
 MBR: MBR only
 BSD: not present
 APM: not present
 GPT: not present
***************************************************************
Found invalid GPT and valid MBR; converting MBR to GPT format
in memory.
***************************************************************
In AskUbuntu
(https://askubuntu.com/questions/1314111/convert-mbr-partition-to-gpt-without-data-loss)
I found an 18 step procedure to create the GPT but I don't trust myself
to do this without error!
I've had no problems so far, so the question is: can I Carry On Regardless?
The idea to swap to an SSD came from a which? magazine. Understandably,
that article didn't mention partition tables. They were providing
guidance on Windows laptops, but wouldn't users come up with the same issue?
Thanks again,
John
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