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Kendor
Asked: 2012-08-22 10:49:20 +0800 CST

Strategy Need to Migrate larger SATA drive to smaller SSD?

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My current 12.04 install is on a 750GiB SATA drive and I would like to smaller 480GiB SSD. I only have about 250GiB in use right now, along with an 8 GiB swap partition.

I regularly use Clonezilla, but understand that I would need to shrink my current drive first before cloning. I started down the road of doing this in gParted, but wasn't sure what to do about the swap partition, as as soon as I went to shrink the main partition, it left a huge hole in the drive.

What's simplest and safest way to do this? BTW, I have a recent clone of the whole drive done using the device to device Clonezilla method.

ssd

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Am up and running. Having a large originating hard drive made the process slow, but in general not too painful. SSD appears very worth it already.

    1. gParted Live USB - I ended up burning a gParted Live USB for this and shrunk my hard drive to match the size of the new SSD. I decided to delete the swap partition to simplify the process.
    2. Clonezilla - I initially tried to use Clonezilla to go device to device, but it appears the only way to do this is to go partition to partition.
    3. Boot-repair -Ubuntu would not boot properly after doing this, so I had to go back and add the boot flag to my SSD. That still left me in an unbootable state. I then booted to a 32-bit Live USB and installed and tried to run boot-repair (http://www.howtogeek.com/114884/how-to-repair-grub2-when-ubuntu-wont-boot/). but alas it turns out that since my systems is 64-bit I needed to do this from a 64-bit Live USB. Quickly created a 64-bit Live USB and then ran boot-repair successfully :-)
    4. Aligned SSD - http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure-your-partitions-are-correctly-aligned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance
    5. Tweaked SSD - http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-tweak-your-ssd-in-ubuntu-for-better-performance/
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