I bought a 500GB SSD to replace my 500GB HDD. Now I want to clone the HDD to the SSD before I replace the HDD drive with the SSD. I have a mixture of Windows 10 and Linux partitions on the HDD. What is the best way to clone it to the SSD?
My Linux partitions are an ext4 and a swap.
The SSD can only be connected to a USB port for cloning.
I have 1TB disk with Ubuntu and I want to replace it with 500GB without uninstalling the system. Is this possible?
I have successfully used dd to clone a partition (/dev/sda2) to an image file on another device (/dev/sdb1) This was done using commands entered into a terminal using a live USB session. My question is can I ditch the usb and just use dd directly on the machine partition I am backing up? Is it just a matter of unmounting the /dev/sda2 partition first? I would ultimately like to use cron to schedule an image file to be created so obviously don’t want to be booting up from usb. Thanks.
Would someone know how to do this? I have cloned equal sized harddrives before with dd but I don't know how to clone a bigger one to a smaller one. The 120GB ssd has less than 50Gb worth of data fyi. How can I do this in Ubuntu?
In terms of stability and performance, is it better to clone the entire HDD to a new computer or start with a fresh install?
btw, much of my production software is in a virtual machine, which can be easily moved.But still, my ubuntu baremetal install (non virtual) is highly customized and tweaked.