What is the best way to upgrade a primary hard drive (M.2 Drive)

[mbb]

Of course partitions must be created beforehand. Then, you can just mount them and copy the contents. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about root or home, it’s the same procedure with the same result. Inclusively, I used this procedure to go from a MBR partitioning scheme to GPT. And recently, I had two SSD’s on my laptop, one for system and home and another for a Windows VM. I decided to create a raid0 lvm to increase speed, and I did that by copying my system drive (home included) to an external drive, then I wiped both drives, created the lvm volumes I wanted, and then just copyed back the system content. Adjusted boot parameters (fstab, etc.) et voilá. No problems!

EDIT: I had to chroot and update grub (I think I also had to change something in the UEFI partition). The point is, the procedure is simple and effective. You just have to take care of the system parameters linked to the hard drives/partitions, such as mount points at boot.

[soundofthunder]

I think the OP has enough options now; short of spinning around and chanting; I’m sure they will choose whatever seems the easiest route.

@mbb

et voilá. No problems!

…and that’s the beauty of Linux…
there are often more ways than one to do the same task.

I was about to mention skinning cats, but I don’t think that’s politically correct anymore.

[Pippin]

This has worked for me several times, choosing the “-k1” option:
https://clonezilla.org//fine-print-live-doc.php?path=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone
.

/dev/nvme0n1p1   4096    618495    614400   300M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2 618496 976773134 976154639 465,5G Linux filesystem

/dev/sda1   2048 1953523711 1953521664 931,5G Linux filesystem

[soundofthunder]

@Pippin

This has worked for me several times

I’ve been using CloneZilla since the Mesozoic era; it’s never failed me.

[Pippin]

Yeah, maybe like 2010-2012 thereabouts.

The only thing I have to do after cloning is edit fstab.

[RiCK-Man-jaro]

@soundofthunder

@rob215x @RiCK-Man-jaro

@RiCK-Man-jaro

Clonezilla download

From a Manjaro Live Installer:

sudo pacman -S clonezilla

But the official page gives all the instructions for its usage.

[soundofthunder]

@RiCK-Man-jaro

But the official page gives all the instructions for its usage.

Then you’ll probably find CloneZilla Live Doc is a better link;
it doesn’t need to be downloaded when it’s in the official repo’s.

CloneZilla has always been my goto.

[RiCK-Man-jaro]

@soundofthunder

Then you’ll probably find CloneZilla Live Doc is a better link;
it doesn’t need to be downloaded when it’s in the official repo’s.

Does the Manjaro download offer to put it on a DVD or USB stick for live booting procedures?

[soundofthunder]

@RiCK-Man-jaro

Does the Manjaro download offer to put it on a DVD or USB stick for live booting procedures?

Scroll up. You’ll see already mentioned that it can be installed in the Manjaro Live environment, to be used outside of the installed system; so, a bootable DVD/ISO/USB, or however the Installer happens to have been created.

I detect some kind of defensiveness from you. It’s unnecessary, as the fact that it can be easily installed from the repo’s in this way is purely and simply, just another option.

Cheers.

[RiCK-Man-jaro]

@soundofthunder

I detect some kind of defensiveness from you. It’s unnecessary, as the fact that it can be easily installed from the repo’s in this way is purely and simply, just another option.

I don’t see why you would detect defensiveness in trying to give the original poster the best possible options.

[soundofthunder]

@RiCK-Man-jaro

I don’t see why you would detect defensiveness in trying to give the original poster the best possible options.

Any possible defensiveness detected (whether actual or not) was in your response to my comment, not in trying to give the poster the best possible options. However, perhaps I was wrong - as far as I’m concerned, it’s no big deal either way. Cheers.

[Mirdarthos]

And besides any- and everything else, the best option is always the repositories. No exception.

[soundofthunder]

@Mirdarthos

And besides any- and everything else

I miss the retort plugin in times like these… and that special salute.

[Mirdarthos]

eah…

[rob215x]

WOW!! I want to thank everyone for all the replies!!

I have a LOT of stuff to read through, which is what I wanted!!

It may or may not be important but the drive I want to replace is EXT4…

From a quick browse of the responses, it looks like Clonezilla will do the job. I already have Manjaro on a USB drive.

I will look into all the suggestions and I’ll post my results! It may take a couple of days because I have a really busy week ahead. I’ll probably do it this weekend.

[MrLavender]

Clonezilla is indeed the easiest way, just make sure you read the instructions all the way to the end.

//NOTE// You can only keep one of the disks in the same machine before you boot it. If you boot the machine with the source disk and the cloned destination disk on the same machine, the booting OS will be confused since there are two identical file systems on the same machine. They have same UUID so the booting OS might mount the wrong file system.

[pilaga]

And also Rescuezilla, with a very intuitive graphical interface.

[RiCK-Man-jaro]

@rob215x

It may or may not be important but the drive I want to replace is EXT4…

The drive isn’t ext4, that particular partition is ext4, and another partition on that same drive is fat32, and also there is two unallocated spaces. You will likely want to clone the entire drive, and not just that ext4 partition. The fat32 partition contains your boot mount point.

[soundofthunder]

@rob215x

It may or may not be important but the drive I want to replace is EXT4

Indeed, it’s not important at all; cloning creates a byte-for-byte copy of all partitions, and all filesystems on the disk, no matter what type they are.

In your case, a full disk clone would copy:

• /dev/nvme0n1p1 → The $ESP; the partition containing the UEFI boot files and directories.
• /dev/nvme0n1p2 → The / (root) partition containing everything else; including your /home directories.

When the cloning is complete, you could either:

a) Use GParted to extend (resize) the / (root) partition to fill the extra 1TB of unallocated space. When the partition is selected in GParted (from the toolbar) choose Partition → Resize/Move and then drag the arrow/edge to the end (right side) of the partition. Or, instead of dragging it all the way to the end you might also consider leaving enough space for swap, which it seems you might not have configured yet.

– or –

b) Don’t touch / (root) at all. Instead, create a new empty partition in the unallocated space which could then become a separate /home partition. Move the content of the original /home to the new /home partition (perhaps using the method @mbb described earlier), change the UUID reference in /etc/fstab to match the new partition.

The main point I’m illustrating is that you have more options right now, than you might later, after committing to any particular scenario.

Cheers.

[rob215x]

Okay! After some delays, I’m doing this thing! I have the system booted from my Manjaro USB installer. I have CloneZilla running…

…but it doesn’t list my nvme drive in the list of source drives.

running GParted shows all of my drives and shows /dev/nvme0n1 (the drive I want to clone)

Any ideas what I’m doing wrong? I’m trying to Google some answers.

EDIT 1:
In CloneZilla, if I choose local_partition_to_local_partition_clone then it lists both of the partitions on my nvme drive. But it doesn’t appear to offer the option of cloning the entire drive. I guess I’ll use GParted to create partitions on the new drive…