On 5/19/2022 10:56 AM, Ant wrote:
> Hello.
>
> What's the best and easy way to copy/move my old slow 320 GB SATA HDD's
> updated Debian bullseye v11.3 to an old fast 115 GB SSD (going to wipe
> it clean)? Yes, SSD is smaller but my Debian's installation only uses
> about 8 GB. I installed Debian use the whole 320 GB drive. I will still
> be using the same 13 yrs. old PC.
>
> Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)
>
The presumption would be, that the real amount of data, fits on a
120GB SSD.
It sounds like it does.
You can use GParted, to shrink and move partitions on the 320GB drive.
Since this is risky, a backup of the drive should be made first.
You want the overall layout, to be a slight bit smaller than 115GB.
You can make it smaller than that if you like.
Once it's smaller than that, you can clone it with Macrium.
A Macrium Rescue CD can do the final step (clones EXT and swap).
*******
If you accepted some "defaults" during installation, you may
be the recipient of an Extended with a Logical partition for
slash in it.
To shrink that, you shrink the Logical first. That would be /dev/sda5 .
The envelope it lives in, is /dev/sda2, and you shrink the envelope
last. Once the envelope is small enough, it should no longer
extend past 115GB. And then you're ready for a clone.
The Macrium Rescue CD should handle
MBR
Primary and secondary GPT partition tables (if present)
Boot track
Partitions
I simulated the whole thing here, using the Mint on my laptop
as a source of an image. I put it in a VM and simulated the
whole thing. And the resultant "small disk" booted just fine.
I did not do any BLKID checks, but the BLKIDs must be the
same, since Macrium does not edit anyones /etc/fstab for them :-)
This means you don't run the 320GB and the 120GB drives
at the same time, after the clone is done. You would need to
change BLKIDs and /etc/fstab, as a separate venture, if you
want to do a thorough job.
The objective of doing it this way, is I did not want to
know anything about the files in the partitions. I just
wanted a recipe that would work at the partition level.
Paul