TUTORIAL En Español
NOTE: this tutorial covers moving a Legacy Mint installation, not UEFI.
I just got my 120GB SSD, and wanted to move my Mint 17.3 Cinnamon root partition from sdb3 on the old hard drive to the new SSD.
Since similar questions are asked occasionally, I documented the move.
EDIT: I later moved my Mint 18 root partition in the same manner. Both work great.
Moving LM17.3Cinn on sdb3 to sdc2 on a new drive (SSD):
Boot the live Mint DVD or USB or boot into a different OS (other than the one you are moving).
Open GParted.
Make a GPT partition table on the new drive: Device menu > New Partition Table > GPT > APPLY
NOTE: You don't have to make a GPT partition table. You can make a msdos partition table - but I don't understand why anyone would want to do that...
Right-click on the unallocated space > New Partition > 1MB > unformatted > APPLY
Right-click on the new 1MB partition > Manage Flags > bios_grub > APPLY
The details for doing those steps are in this tutorial.
If you create a swap partition, it should be on the big hard drive, not the SSD. I don't have any swap partitions any more, because I have 8GB of ram, and I install the swapspace program.
After the partition table and the first partition (bios_grub) are created, per the tutorial, you are ready to copy your Mint root partition.
In GParted, right-click on the original Mint root partition > Copy
Right-click on the unallocated space on the new SSD > Paste
My 30GB root partition took 3 minutes, 12 seconds to copy to the SSD.
Open a terminal and run the command
sudo blkid
to determine the UUID numbers.You will see that the original Mint partition and the new copy both have the same UUID number. This is a bad situation which MUST be corrected before you reboot.
Right-click on the new partition > New UUID > APPLY
I like to have a Label on my partitions, so I right-click on the new partition > Label File System > LM17.3Cinn (or any Label you like) > APPLY
Close GParted and go back to the terminal.
My new root partition shows as /dev/sdc2. I will use that here as an example. You might have to change that for your configuration.
Mount the new root partition at /mnt:
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sudo mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt
sudo blkid
to determine the new UUID number for the new partition.Edit /etc/fstab, with gedit or xed, to reflect the new UUID number of the new / partition.:
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gksudo gedit /mnt/etc/fstab
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# new / cloned to /dev/sdc2
UUID=a09ad702-6248-41ac-a5c6-af105bb55de9 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
DO NOT use the same /home partition for 2 different OS's !
Now you are ready to fix the initramfs and install Grub.
Close gedit and go back to the terminal.
Enter all these commands:
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for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
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sudo chroot /mnt
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update-initramfs -u
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grub-install --recheck /dev/sdc
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update-grub
CTRL-D to exit the terminal
All done!
When you reboot, you might want to set the new drive (in my case, the SSD), to be the first drive in the boot order, if that is where you installed Grub.
It all worked perfectly, I am editing this tutorial from the new Mint installation - on the new SSD !
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