Cloning the contents of a mechanical hard disk to an SSD

[mhenriday]

Now that the vanilla edition of Mint 18.3 is about to be released, I've finally decided to get on with it and replace my ancient mechanical 500 GB hard disk with a Samsung 850-Series EVO 500GB (I'd have preferred to install an 960 NVMe M.2-card but that would necessitate replacing my motherboard). In this context I'm looking for suggestions for cloning the contents of the mechanical hard disk to the SSD using a docking station connected to my computer via a USB 3.0 port. I'm inclined to use the dd command in a terminal, which would seem to be the simplest and most straightforward way of going about it, but thought I'd like to get some input from others with experience of this matter before setting to work....

Grateful for any and all suggestions !...

Henri

[deepakdeshp]

You can use clonezilla to clone disks or partitions.

[mhenriday]

Thanks, deepakdeshp for your speedy reply ! I'm aware of Clonezilla, which is available from the Mint package repository, but I note that some users have found it confusing and hard to use. Would my setup, with the SSD in a docking station connected to my computer via a USB 3.0 cable be likely to work with this program ? Otherwise, I suppose I shall just have to rely on my old standbys - trial and error....

Henri

[pbear]

For a one-off duplication, dd probably makes the most sense, though it will be interesting to see whether someone has a better idea.

Regarding Clonezilla, while I'd say it's needless complexity for this task, you should seriously consider it for full system backup. (Unless, of course, you already have some other tool for that.) It's a little confusing, but the website has a complete walk though with screenshots, so easy enough to figure out. Also, understand the developer is using English as a second language, so a certain amount of accommodation is appropriate. One last thing. For a standalone computer, you want Clonezilla Live, which runs outside Mint. That's available on the website. What's in the repo is the server version.

[Mute Ant]

The dd command stands for Disk Dump, but it was invented back when a disk was measured in tens of MB. With hundreds of GB it is too primitive, one I/O error and hours of transfer is wasted because you have to start again. I suggest ddrescue as the modern, error-resistant successor to the original. From a Live Session boot of Mint...

sudo ddrescue /dev/sdX --force /dev/sdY log.txt

...will do the job, giving you a continuous progress report, retrying if there's an error, and the log.txt file allows you to interrupt the transfer and resume where you left off. sdX is your original drive, sdY is the empty destination drive.

GNU ddrescue 1.19
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued: 274268 kB, errsize: 0 B, current rate: 12779 kB/s
ipos: 274268 kB, errors: 0, average rate: 39181 kB/s
opos: 274268 kB, run time: 7 s, successful read: 0 s ago
Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 1 (forwards)