Cloning partitions to bigger partitions

My current drive is about 250 gig with win10 in sda2 (144G) and Linux on
sda5 (93G). I just got a 500 gig SSD, and I want to transfer the old partitions to
the that drive.

I want to copy the old 144G partition (win10) to a new 250g partition and the
old 93G partition (Ubuntu) to the remaining 250G on the new 500G SSD .

I could not get Clonezilla to save small > bigger partitions; The size remains the same = A lot of wasted space on new drive. My only other option is to start all over, but I hate to have to find/reinstall all the useful programs I’ve collected the last couple years.

Any ideas would be appreciated, Thank you in advance.

Maybe a linux rescue disk, or even something like a live USB of Ubuntu, go into the live session… then fire up “Disks” or “gparted” and it should let you grow it, expand, onto unused space…

I’ve done this reasonably often enough to be familiar with it - however in my case, I’ve probably use the terminal to “dd” the contents of one onto another - then use the gnome / gui front end to gparted to expand (must unmount the new one before expanding / growing).

if it’s already an LVM - with ext4 or xfs, these can be expanded online while mounted (I know I do this all the time via terminal on Linux servers) - but there’s a risk involved if you’re moving the “end” sector (in something like fdisk) to the physical end - hence safer to go with gparted… What “we” do in VMware land, to avoid this risk, we just add another VHD to the VM and tack that onto the end of the LVM (not an option in your case).

Boot Ubuntu Live USB
Fire up disks or gparted
Expand that new partition to the end of the disk…

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Thank you, I’ll try that and report back.

Yes, that’s a known “behaviour” of many imaging tools.
@daniel.m.tripp is right, just fire up SysRescueCD or something (even Linux Mint DVD) and fix the partition layout with gparted.

If you don’t necessarily need the old drive immediately, you can just clone the old partitions, resize them to get bigger and keep the old drive, as it is. Then, you use the new one, check if everything is alright and not corrupted and if nothing pops up between 1 week to 1 month regular usage, then the cloned drive should be safe enough, to get to re-use the old drive for something else.

If something goes wrong, as in you would notice any corruption, you can still return to the old drive, within the testing trime frame.

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Boot Ubuntu Live USB - Done
Fire up disks or gparted - Done
Expand that new partition to the end of the disk… NOT Done!

I used the Mate install disk and ran Gparted form there…It won’t let me change the size.

I had a second possible solution: Back up the entire “old” disk. Then on the “new” disk reinstall win10 and Mate, and finally restore all my files from the backup?

The backups I’ve tried won’t let me copy the backed up files to the new disk. Need to find a backup that will copy everything, including my “stuff” and then let me move the backup to the new disk.

Could you please take a lot of screenshots and post them here? It’s hard to see what you see, without seeing anything.

I’ll send some screenshots tonight. Thank you

Thanks for helpful responses. Problem is solved. I took the easy way out.

OK, good to hear.
But…

We choose to use GNU/Linux in this time and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

:wink:

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