Replacing a primary drive

My laptop has a 1-TB drive and I am out of space. I am replacing it with a new 2-TB drive and wish to copy the old drive onto the new.
I have been using ‘dd’ but appear to have problems.
I am using: … sudo dd bs=4M if=/dvv/sdb of=/dev/sda status=progress oflag=sync
On the first occasion the transfer worked but it only wrote a 1-TB partition to the new drive and I want to use the entire 2-TB drive.
With another try the system simply writes without end.
Can you give me some advice please.
Sorry if this is the wrong place to post.

Well cloning means to have a 1:1 copy, so that is totally normal. You need to get familiar on how to expand partition with gparted.

I did use gparted to expand the partition but found that I was unable to write to the second half of the disk.
Is there a way too expand the active partition while it is in operation?

¿The second half of the disk is empty and there are no other partitions? Try growpart…

https://man.archlinux.org/man/community/cloud-guest-utils/growpart.1.en

You can also use Rescuezilla to clone disks and then use the included Gparted.

https://rescuezilla.com/screenshots

Thank you … didnt know about growpart … will give that a try.

2 Likes

Why not using Clonezilla and just cloning the partitions?

1 Like

As a precaution – and I hope this is not necessary. Do a Time shift backup to an external drive before cloning to a bigger drive. That way if you run into any problems like UUID issues you can do a restore and all will be well. But maybe you already installed it.

For sure the best and most secure way to clone drives. Just to be precise - with Clonezilla you may not only clone partition but entire disk to bigger (and even smaller) disk. Did this dozen times and this tool never failed me.

Entire process is quite simple: download and burn to usb Clonezilla iso, boot to Clonezilla, choose your 1tb disk and the choose 2tb disk. Wait some time for the process to finish and you have your old system in 2tb disk with no risk to damage your partition by manualy changing it’s size.

1 Like