Hi, all.
I originally installed Ubuntu MATE on a 100GB hard drive. Now I want to move that install to a larger 500GB hard drive. What is the best way to do that?
I've clone Windows drives with Macrium Reflect and have a couple external drive caddies. I'm just not sure what software to use. Any help would be appreciated.
If you're comfortable with the terminal, the easiest would be to dd the drive and use GParted to expand the partition. This should also keep the bootloader (GRUB 2) intact.
Find out the drive letters of the source (100 GB) and target (500 GB) drive - use Disks, GParted or this terminal command to find out:
sudo fdisk -l
Suppose the original 100 GB is /dev/sda and the larger 500 GB is /dev/sdb, run dd like so:
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=8M
Be absolutely sure you got the correct drive paths as the command is irreversible!
There won't be any output until the command finishes, so it will take a while. Speed depends on how the drives are connected.
Once the drive is cloned, fire up GParted and resize the partition to fill the remaining 400 GB of space.
Disconnect the old drive, and reboot into the new clone.
You could use Clonzilla to create an image of your current install then restore that image to your new larger drive. You may end up with a partition the same same size as your original partition, but using Gparted you can expand that partition to fill your drive.
There is a channel on you tube called Explaining Computers Chris is a University Professor so can clearly describe what you need to do.
He has a video in his archive on cloning and imaging.
His video on installing Linux helped me get started, from there I never looked back.
File systems and installing fresh drives are a big concern for most especially struggling with EXT4 and NTFS partitions.
I tried once and the drive was not even recognized in BIOS so I can imagine the difficulties others must have but Explaining Computers is a good start if you need it.