Home / ubuntu / Questions / 6925
Accepted
Bryan
Asked: 2010-10-14 11:24:00 +0800 CST

Is there an easy way to transfer an OS from one hard drive to another?

  • 772

So here's my situation. I have a dual boot windows7 and Ubuntu 10.04.1 on a run-of-the-mill hard drive. In a day or two I will get a new 64GB SSD in the mail and want to boot from that for obvious reasons. I was wondering if there was an easy way to transfer both OS's from my current hard drive to my SSD. I would normally reinstall the two on the new disk but my windows7 product key only works for activation once and I would like to keep it. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

hardware windows-7 installation

4 Answers

  1. I highly recommend clonezilla. It will allow you to take an image of your entire drive, and then intelligently put it onto the new drive. It's really brilliant software.

    • 11
  2. Best Answer

    You can set up your new drive with partitions the same size as your old one. Then you can copy the partitions from the old harddrive to the new using the command dd using the block devices in /dev (i.e dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb2 bs=1024 etc).

    Finally you need to re-install grub in the MBR of your new drive. Some explanation how to do this are on Ubuntu's help wiki.

    • 1

  3. i dont have full info, just tips... sorry :(

    • you can use gparted (gui) instead dd (console) to copy partition data. Boot from ubuntu cd and check http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/move/move.htm to enlightenment
    • you still have a missing point: grub configuration. Grub control witch partition need boot. I have no idea how complex is to change/configure/install grub by hand. I dont remember a tool to make this task easy.

    I used gparted, to move my data partition from old hd to new one, not full os install

    • 1

  4. SSD, 64 GB, OP Clonezilla

    Read first the limit on their page. Output must be bigger or (=) than source. So failed.

    Use GParted

    or

    Move Installation to new disk

    • 0