Install on SSD hard disk with GPT partition

[lucamax]

I had decide to add a 250GB Samsung 840 SSD hard disk to my actual system (Dell Precision M4400) with Mint13 64 bits on a 500gb drive .
It will be the primary drive with Mint13 , the second drive in the dvd bay will hold Windows XP and large data.

It was not easy but finally I was able to create with gdisk two GPT partitions , a small boot partition of 2 mb, and a ext4 partition, on the SSD drive and format it with

sudo mke2fs -t ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/sdb2

Now I would like to trasfer my actual Mint13 install to the SSD drive but I have 2 problems:
- I'm unable to copy the files of Mint13 to the ext4 partition of the SSD drive , drag and drop copy with via sudo nautilus gave errors, DD command tried but the target partition is smaller than origin so it fails.
- I do not know how to create a correct boot on the SSD drive, perhaps via grub ?

I would prefer to simply transfer my actual Mint13 rather than a fresh install if possible...

[mr_raider]

gparted has a function to copy partitions. Try using that.

As for the grub issue, are you using an EFI or Legacy (BIOS) boot?

[lucamax]

Thans for reply !

I will try with Gparted but it needs to have partitions unmounted so I will need to put the live cd of Mint 13 on a usb drive for it.

I have a legagy Bios boot (I guess since it is a 3 years old notebook)

BTW I'm trying to drag and drop files, apart from some special files that cannot be copy it seems to work.

[mintybits]

I would not use GPT for your SSD. It is of little value when the disk size is below 2TiB and it adds unecessary complexity to your Mint transfer from HD to SSD.

If your Mint on your 500GB is at the start of the disk you may be able to simply shrink your Mint partition to under 250GB and then dd copy it to your SSD. Alternatively, you can use rsync to copy it. It depends what you current partitions are and how much space you have used.

Please post the output of

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -lu
df -h

[lucamax]

I have read everywhere that MBR is deprecated with SSD drives while GPT is highly suggested .

I have been able to copy the linux partition to my new drive.
Now I need to set up correctly the boot loader, Grub2 , but I need to create a new one since the partitions on the SSD drive is very different fron the old one (no more dual boot I guess since the Ntfs partition will be now on the DVD bay drive).

[mintybits]

I have read everywhere that MBR is deprecated with SSD drives while GPT is highly suggested .

I hope that isn't really stated everywhere because it is complete nonsense.

I have been able to copy the linux partition to my new drive.
Now I need to set up correctly the boot loader, Grub2 , but I need to create a new one since the partitions on the SSD drive is very different fron the old one (no more dual boot I guess since the Ntfs partition will be now on the DVD bay drive).

Have you used GPT or MBR for your SSD?
Did you clone or did you copy?
If you used MBR it is easy to set Grub up.
More details needed if you want help with Grub.

[lucamax]

I have read several guides , mostly in my language italian where MBR was deprecated : http://www.tomshw.it/forum/hard-disk-ss ... posix.html
Anyway GPT does not seems a bad idea also because if I'll update my pc it will be probably a NON bios boot motherboard, so for sure at first it seems more complicated , for example for bios boot systems you must create a small partition for boot , take a look at this : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gpt/

Have you used GPT or MBR for your SSD?
Did you clone or did you copy?

I had use GPT and copy all files , no errors apart temporary files that were skipped

My new SSD have only two partitions, 2mb boot partition (with ET02 flag for GPT partition) and an ext4 partition for Mint13 , thats all.
I guess I need to creat a new boot file with Grub2 (Grub2 because of GPT support) , right ?

[mr_raider]

Boot from Live CD/USB

Create a GPt table on the SSD using parted, gdisk or gparted.

Create a partition with gparted, about 100MB, but do not format it. Set the flag to BIOS grub

Create your other partitions as desired, (/, home etc...)

Copy your partitions with gparted just right click copy and paste. The target partition must be bigger. If necessary shrink the source partition.

You need to clean up the UUIDs and change the grub to boot from from GPT. Best advice is to use boot-repair:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

[lucamax]

Thanks for your suggestions .
It wasn't simple and I had to do a a lot of tries to be able to have my system on the SSD
Boot-repair did not work automatically , I had to manually modify the etc/fstab file and remove wrong entries to have it to work.


Therefore I am very very disappointed , going from an Hybrid Sata hard disk to a SSD hard drive did not increase performances (because of Sata2 controller on My Precision M4400).

Audio device disappear , I mean no hardware anymore !!! ???
No idea why and how to get it back again...

VLC freeze when I open an HD video and movie player is really slow too

[lucamax]

The system il falling apart
No way to update files, no more lan connection, no more mouse .

After several hours to get an install trasfer on the dammed GPT partition I leave !

It is no more reasonable to continue, I will sell my SSD drive on Ebay and Adios ...

[mr_raider]

:twisted:
The system il falling apart
No way to update files, no more lan connection, no more mouse .

After several hours to get an install trasfer on the dammed GPT partition I leave !

It is no more reasonable to continue, I will sell my SSD drive on Ebay and Adios ...

Try wiping the disk completely and doing a fresh install. Then just import over any needed data from the old drive.

[mintybits]

Format your SSD in MBR format. Save yourself a lot of hassle. There is no benefit at all of using GPT on a small SSD drive.
GPT is only needed for disks larger than 2TiB.

You cannot just drag and drop files when copying a root filesystem. You need to either clone the partition using Gparted (as has been mentioned) and then change the new partitions UUID and then sort the Grub configuration out OR you need to copy the filesystem to the new one using "rsync -vaxHAX". Or start with a fresh install on the SSD as suggested.

[catweazel]

I have read everywhere that MBR is deprecated with SSD drives while GPT is highly suggested .

Ridiculous. There is no need for GPT on such small drives. I run six SSDs and do not use GPT.

[catweazel]

Try wiping the disk completely

Oh great. The guy has an SSD and you want him to clobber one entire write cycle on a device that has limited write cycles?

[catweazel]

:twisted:
The system il falling apart
No way to update files, no more lan connection, no more mouse .

I will sell my SSD drive on Ebay and Adios ...

Use MBR. That's all you need to do.

[mintybits]

So, boot a live CD and use GParted to format the SSD as MBR.
Then use GParted to copy & paste your original partition to the empty space on the SSD. Afterwards, open a terminal and change the UUID of the new partition so that it is not the same as the original (or there will be boot problems):

Code: Select all

sudo tune2fs -U random /dev/sda1

assuming your SSD partition is called sda1. Change as needed.
Then mount the new filesystem and edit fstab to put the new UUID in the entry for mounting "/". Use the blkid command to see what the new UUID is.

Code: Select all

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo blkid
sudo gedit /mnt/etc/fstab

Now reboot to the original Mint and open a terminal and update the original Grub

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

It should now list the new copy of Mint as well as the original.
Now reboot again and choose the new Mint from the Grub menu.
Once booted in the new Mint, install grub to the SSD and update it

Code: Select all

sudo grub-install /dev/sda
sudo update-grub


Then reboot but this time tell your bios to boot the SSD device first. This should result in a Grub menu with the SSD Mint listed first and bootable by default.
Once the new Mint boots ok and you check everything looks fine you can delete the old Mint and re-run update-grub to remove it from the boot menu.

When you are ready you should also edit the fstab to add the "discard" and "noatime" directives to the "/" mount line to improve your SSD performance. Example:

Code: Select all

UUID=f078dfd0-4d38-4f8f-b829-5d5be7ff20bb         /         ext4    discard,noatime,errors=remount-ro      0       1