Andrew,
On 2020-04-22 19:22, andrew beck wrote:
Hey guys.
Just a quick question here
I recently heard some funny clanking noises in my old 2nd hand hard drive
on my VMC and thought I better change it out and get a SSD in there.
I have a bunch of stuff loaded onto the hardrive for probe basic gui and
other stuff and would like to clone the drive and keep everything.
I can manage a windows cloning I am just not sure if the process will work
on a linux system. I am using a crucial brand SSD and can download the
drive cloning software (it is rebadged acronis cloning software)
anyway some help would be appreciated.
regards
Andrew
Linux comes with all software to manage system in any way needed.
There are different scenarios you can use to do what you need.
You can start with booting up from a CD or it's image on USB stick if
the main drive is not booting up. Otherwise just add second drive and
bootup. Find how is second drive recognized:
dmesg | less <--- in x-terminal
look for lines SCSI, ATA and such to see what the second drive is
recognized as.
To partition the disk I use fdisk command; see 'man fdisk' for details.
Make sure you do not do it on original drive!!!
I happen to have two drives and mount the second one like this:
/dev/sdb1 1.4T 877G 441G 67% /backup
/dev/sdb2 672G 208G 451G 32% /virtual
Mount old and new drives and sync files across.
For example:
/dev/sda is old drive,
/dev/sdb is the new one.
Let's assume there is only one partition for the files on old drive
/dev/sda1
You would make one partition on the second also. However, you need to
add a swap partition about 2 to 5 times RAM size to make "Linux happy".
Swap can be found this way:
swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda3 partition 8388604 0 -2
mkdir /mnt/sda1
mkdir /mnt/sdb1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
In case there is more than one data partition you might want to do the
same on the second drive. In any case, I would use a separate partition
for /home so that work files are in one place separate from the OS itself.
When the partitions are mounted you may use rsync to sync files to the
new drive partition. Example:
rsync -av /mnt/sda1/ /mnt/sdb1
rsync -av /mnt/sda2/ /mnt/sdb2 <--- for second partition.
and so on.
Pay attention to '/' (slash) at the end of source directory to ensure
correct way of file sync.
rsync is great because you can transfer files across the network to
other systems. Read man pages for details
man rsync
If you want to know how long it takes for task to complete use
time rsync -av /mnt/sda1/ /mnt/sdb1
Note, the above commands need to be executed as user root. Alternative
is to prepend sudo to the above commands but I prefer becoming root this
way:
sudo su -
and enter password you use for login. That's assuming root does not have
special password. I always have one x-terminal tab dedicated to root for
sysadmin work. Note that the prompt will change to # at the end.
One more thing, if the new drive has a partition on it, very likely,
then your OS might automount it during login. You need to unmount it
before you use fdisk to delete and create new Linux partitions on it.
Check with
df -h
Good luck,
--
Rafael Skodlar
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