Thread: duplicating hard drive to bigger one

Hi all Just wanted to let y'all know that the dd command worked perfectly. Took ages though as it was via an external USB to SATA converter (~4Mb/sec.... agonizing even with only 36Gb to dupe). Thanks all

Absolutely, just copy and paste the partition over then once it's done resize it to whatever you want. That's how I backup fresh installs of Windows. I resize it to almost nothing then copy it, when I need to copy it back I just resize it afterwards. Edit - BTW don't partition the disk beforehand, copy and paste the partitions to unallocated space.

This operation turned out fine. My Mythbox can now hold an additional 500 hours of HD programming. Two notes: I used the KDE partition GUI. Gpartd looked just fine, BUT it did not support copy and pasting of XFS partitions. (Which is the fs type used by my Mythbox.) KDE partition manager did. Go figure. Neither manager supports copying and pasting of the elements of extended partitions. My "/" and swap fs are contained in an...

The reason I suggested clonzilla is that it can clone a partition to any other partition that's at least as big as the source. I'm not sure, off hand, how it handles partitioning/formatting, so I suggested using gparted first, just to make sure it's done, and done right.

In FreeBSD, the standard method is dump and restore. Some VERY cursory googling indicates that this can work for Linux as well. Wondering if anyone has tried it, and if so, how were the results

If you trust in wikipedia you can do so: "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb - Copies whole harddisk hda to another (hdb)." It's not in the english wikipedia, don't know why. I think it should work, but I haven't tried this yet. At least try it, copy the data like above and if your PC wouldn't boot with the new harddisk, you just can attach the old one again.

dd works flawlessly for me. I use it to copy partitions and drives all the time. I would choose dd over gparted any day.

EDIT: sorry missed the fact you're using a laptop and have to ditch the old drive still, LVM solves the problem of partition size doesn't it? are you not using LVM? it kinda makes all this a non-issue just add the new drive to your volume group and carve it up however you like Dave

i've done this with acronis true image - you can tell it which partitions to expand, you'd have to have a supported filesystem though, and i wouldn't try it with any luks-encrypted partitions as i think that would not work at all.

Another option is to buy a USB Data Transfer Kit. It is a USB-based system comprising software and an empty external drive case. You install your upgrade drive into the case and duplicate the contents of your old drive straight to the new one. You then swap the drives; the new drive in your laptop now contains your complete OS, data, and apps, and, as a bonus, you can use the old drive in the enclosure as an external backup unit. Let me know...