New drive for root partition, without fresh install

Support & Help Requests
1

I have 1 drive with 2 partitions, root and swap. I am about to replace a broken M2.SSD and I want it to take over as the root partition. The current drive will become the home partition.

Is there a way to do this without a fresh install? Can I dd copy the MBR and all other directories except home to the new SSD? If I change the boot option in BIOS will it boot from the new drive? And then change the mount point of the old drive?

TIA!

2

Hi @Isaiah_Sellassie,

simply clone the old drive (if possible) and that should do it!. :slight_smile: You just need to tell the cloning software which partitions you want to clone. The new drive must be the same size or larger than the source drive!. :smiley:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/disk_cloning

http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php

I hope it helps. :smiley:

3

Hi wolfman,

Thanks for the reply. As I explained, I do not want to clone the whole drive. I am trying to split my root and home to 2 drives. The new drive is going to be smaller than the current. I searched to see if the dd command could be used. Is there a way to dd and skip a particular directory, in my case /home?

4

Hi Isaiah,

the following link explains how to clone a partition as already linked above:

https://www.wikihow.com/Clone-a-Partition :smiley:

5

Thanks for the reply, wolfman. I am not trying to clone the partition, as I stated above.

6

Hi Isaiah,

I would use the following link instead of worrying too much about a fresh install, at least your data will still be there, not knowing exactly what you want you can still work on the partitions names using the tool!:

Install Ubuntu (Mate) using "Something else" method :smiley:

7

Thanks for all your help, wolfman.

I think I’ll just back up my data to an external drive, delete my home folder, clone partition to the new drive, remount the old drive as home, and then restore my home folder from the backup. I was trying to find a shortcut, but maybe that’s not worth the risks.

Or, I may dd copy the MBR to the new drive, cat copy all the directories except home, set the new drive as default boot in BIOS and see what happens. I may need to make a dummy user account first and copy that home directory over so I can get to a desktop and change the mount point of the old drive.

I’ll drop a line here with how it all went.

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