Time to clone and upgrade laptop HDD to SSD

[AJG]

With the great help from Laurent85, I was able to get Cinnamon 18.3 up and running along side of Win 10 on my Toshiba Satellite. Original 1TB drive is slow and seems to a bit squirrely though chkdsk never found any errors before the Mint install. That said, I will be migrating to a 2TB SSD, stretching some of the partitions after, and have to tear the bottom of the laptop apart to get to the original drive. It will be a Toshiba HDD to a Samsung EVO.

Clone first via USB or install new first?
Any recommendations on cloning software? I used a utility on an older copy of UBCD when I migrated my desktop to an SSD. At the time, that was Win7 only and I installed Mint 18.1 after on the SSD. I've got both 18.3 and Win10 loaded on the laptop with all the requisite partitions for both.

Any suggestions welcome. ddrescue mentioned in another thread here.

Thanks,
AJG

[Laurent85]

You can clone your hdd to new ssd using ddrescue from a live session. First check no hdd or ssd partitions are mounted.

Install gddrescue:

Code: Select all

apt update
apt install gddrescue

Clone hdd to ssd. Change device id's to corresponding hdd and ssd id's, take care not using wrong id before proceeding :

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sudo ddrescue /dev/sdX /dev/sdY --force

Where /dev/sdX is your hdd and /dev/sdY the new ssd, replace /dev/sdX and /dev/sdY with corresponding device id's.

[AJG]

Thank you. Looks like this will take a while. I'm assuming I can enlarge some of the partitions once installed. I opted to install Mint on the old drive (didn't have much space left) to verify that the Satellite would even support a dual boot.

[Laurent85]

Before you proceed see gparted documentation Moving Space Between Partitions.

[AJG]

Well Happy New Year Laurent85! Odd thing. After successfully (I hope) using ddrescue I re-booted, removed the Live USB and SSD (which was in a USB container) and I no longer am able to get the rEFInd boot screen or boot into Mint on the original HDD which is still installed.

I ran through the steps you helped me with before (viewtopic.php?f=46&t=260547) but no joy this time. Sigh....

[AJG]

Well, now this is getting very strange. Never get the rEFInd boot manager but after a complete shutdown it booted up in Mint. Wasn't looking at the screen at the time so I missed GRUB pop up. I had been restarting it and it always went to Win10. So now, on a cold boot, I no longer get the rEFInd boot manager, but get GRUB with a selection for the Mint or Win install.
Sooo, if I restart the machine, I get put into Win10 always with no rEFInd or grub menu.
If I shut down the machine, I get the grub menu. If I choose Mint, I get a quick screen display saying remove Live USB (even though there is no Live USB in the machine), and then it boots directly into my installed LM.
Very strange.

[caf4926]

Sounds like you already went ahead
But I have done similar to what you are asking but I did it this way:

Copy the entire HDD (running from a live USB system) and using something like this
ionice -c3 ddrescue /dev/sda /media/sdx1/laptop.iso

Writing it back to the new drive
something like this
ionice -c3 ddrescue /media/sdx1/laptop.iso /dev/sda

There are variable such as the sdx and the PATH /media
depending on the live system
I have used Parted Magic mostly

Get everything up and running before you do any partition adjustments

[Laurent85]

Happy new year AJG.

Maybe the computer efi nvram got confused by 2 drives with same uuid's, and messed up efi nvram entries. Do not attach cloned drive to your computer while booting.

Provide efi boot loader entries and more:

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sudo parted --list --script
sudo efibootmgr -v
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
sudo find /mnt -iname "*.efi" -exec md5sum {} + | sort
sudo umount /mnt

[AJG]

Probably. I repeated the process you told me to go through late last night and am back up and running. Somehow Microsoft bootmgr.efi went missing and I wound up not being able to boot into Windows and the keyboard froze in bios. Ran through the procedure you gave me yesterday and it's back up and running. Real test will be when I swap the drives today if I can figure out how to take the bottom case off.

[AJG]

This just started about a week ago (but hadn't used the laptop for about two weeks). If I cold boot, I get the grub menu. If I restart, I get rEFInd menu. They both work fine, just curious why I'm seeing grub since I had never been able to get the grub menu on this Satellite before. Strange.