I tried cloning the the HDD to the SSD using my bootable USB EaseUS Todo Backup (purchased) that has cloning. Unfortunately, my 9.2 version doesn't recognize EXT4 filesystem natively and has to use the sector by sector copy feature which takes a long time. Because it's a sector by sector copy, I couldn't resize any partition so that I could fit the larger 320 GB to the 250 GB. One thing it does have is an option to ✔---Optimize for SSD.
I then turned to my bootable USB (Linux version) of MiniTool Wizard Pro 8.1.1 (purchased). It's always done well for me with partitioning. Oddly enough, my
/
and /home
partitions weren't being recognized as EXT4, only as "Other". Another EXT4 partition was recognized as "Ext4" and the Swap was recognized as "Linux Swap".Because
/
and /home
partitions were recognized as "Other", it was a sector by sector copy. At this point, I figured that I had better shrink the 320 GB HDD partitions so that they'd be small enough to fit onto the 250 GB SSD. I did that and then completed the copy. When I tried to boot the SSD, the message was that there was no OS found and was unbootable.So I turned to Clonezilla, which I'm not crazy about but I figured that it's going to do the job. After burning a bootable DVD of the latest Clonezilla, I proceeded to clone the HDD to the SSD. Another hurdle. Clonezilla complained that my 320 GB HDD had both MBR and GPT elements (not a quote) and I would need to run
sudo sgdisk --zap /dev/sdx
on it. I did that. I proceeded to try the clone again. All seemed to work, but when I tried to boot from the SSD, it was a no go.This was the point where I was at my wits end. I created an Aptik backup of my HDD, then I decided to do a complete fresh install onto the SSD and restore the Aptik backup. It worked like a charm! There were only a couple of items I had to redo (my desktop picture, login picture and options, and others that I don't recall).
Thank goodness for Aptik!!!