Hi, I’m going to change my laptop’s ssd to a new one. The old one is appr. 5 or 6 years old and it’s my work laptop. I’m just thinking of the potential failure of the ssd and wan’t to change it to a new one (a bigger one) before the old one dies.
I have Mint and Gentoo dual boot on the laptop. The Mint is just a “backup solution” if I can’t access Gentoo I can access Mint and chroot to Gentoo and fix it. I can re-install Mint / any other OS afterwards. I don’t need to think of that partition at this point. My only concern is to have the Gentoo and boot partition to the new ssd. As I see it I have few options:
-dd
-rsync
-stage4
-Clonezilla
and then edit /etc/fstab and maybe the boot needs updating.
I would like to dd the old ssd to the new one. It’s the easiest solution for me. The laptop has two ssd slots so it should be easy. The question is should I change from EXT4 to Btrfs at this point? I have always used ext4 and it always works. What’s your opinion to just clone the ssd or format the new ssd to Btrfs and then clone? The Btrfs snapshot thing is a tempting reason.
I do not know of any reason not to try Btrfs in that situation. I assume you will be able to boot a Btrfs root filesystem.
For moving an OS I use rsync -aAXvH ....
then edit fstab
and I delete /boot/grub/grub.cfg
before I try to boot , it will boot without it
If you use dd in partition copying mode you will overwrite the Btrfs filesystem with ext4. You need a filesystem copy not a partition clone…If you use dd in file copying mode, what would happen to permissions and links?
I personally feel that a filesystem should be only a filesystem, and should not be combined with an LVM or a snapshot utility. But that is just my feeling. I avoid ZFS and Btrfs for that reason.
I dont think BSD supports Btrfs.
Thanks! I am not so familiar with the newer file systems but now I have a chance to try Btrfs. The SSD has arrived so maybe tonight I’ll start the process.
Anyone here who uses Btrfs? What’s your recommendation? Stay with EXT4 or switch?
Here’s my plan:
I plug in the new SSD, boot to Mint, use Gparted for making the new boot & root partitions (+format) and then rsync root from old to new. Then chroot to new SSD, install + config grub to /efi and all should work.
How that sounds?
Edit: the main board is not same as per Acer’s website claims. It only has one slot for SSD😳
Now I have to make a full dd to another disk and then change the SSD and boot from USB.
Sounds easy.
I assume you want to write grub to the new SSD so it will boot independently, and let the new copy of Gentoo control grub. The easiest way to achieve that is go install grub from within the new gentoo, and then do update-grub. Doing it that way will signal to the BIOS that the new gentoo is controlling grub on the new SSD.
I need to first get a spare disk which is at least 200gb. At the moment I have two 256 ssds on my home computer. My plan is to format one of the ssds and ssh+rsync the laptop’s old ssd there and then switch the new ssd inside the laptop and boot with USB live OS and then ssh+rsync. It starts to feel a bit of a pain… Or I can buy a 256gb USB stick. Any other ideas?
If you install mint first on your new SSD then mint sorts out boot records for the grub and creates the partition automatically without user intervention. Then after install your other Linux version it should then ask get rid of mint or put side by side.
Thanks for the idea! I’m currently making a fresh stage4 tarball of my Gentoo just in case. I will try to use it for installation and if it don’t work I’ll ssh to my home computer and dd my SSD there.
The process for using the stage4 is the same as a new install of Gentoo but instead of generic stage3 I’m using the stage4 and I should have my system back. Then just install grub and edit etc/fstab.
I have Mint USB so I’ll use it for the Gentoo install.
Yes, if all fails I’ll get an adapter for the disk. At the moment I think it’s almost ready. I used the mkstage4 script which makes a system tarball and got the system to boot to grub and also to dracut. Now emerging sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin and it should work.
A quick update… when I installed Mint on the new ssd it also installed a boot partition which changed my boot process to go to the grub rescue. I needed to remove the partition with GParted. While at GParted I noticed I had had a typo when I partitioned the Gentoo’s boot partition. It was 10Gbs
Now my disk looks a bit funny:
I am using a swapfile at the moment but could just put swap on the unallocated 7Gb area. The other unallocated part is where Mint installed grub. I’ll just add it to the Gentoo root.
Because you used Mint to install grub, Mint will end up controlling grub. Is that what you want?
If you want Gentoo to control grub, just repeat the grub-install from within Gentoo, then remake grub.cfg in Gentoo.
Yes to both your questions Paul. Although I don’t use Mint for anything, it’s installed only for troubleshooting if Gentoo won’t boot. It’s like a USB live OS but it is on SSD.
well, I changed Mint to Debian (without DE) just to get a smaller footprint and after all, I’ll use it only for trouble shoot if needed so only need to access tty. Might resize the partition 3
