Moving current LM installation to new SSD, or starting fresh?

[RIH]

Something like..

/media/YOURNAME/DISKNAME

Can get it from Location field of Drives' Properties..

[fatesrider]

I'm trying to do the same kind of thing - basically move my system drive to a larger drive.

I've done this a lot of times in Windows, but I'm not sure how this works in Linux. I only moved to Linux in April, so I'm kind of a noob with it.

Some things to explain:

My computer is 100% Linux and I do NOT dual boot or have another OS installed. AFAIK, I didn't install GRUB, so I expect the bootloader is whatever one was the default installed with Mint.

I'm running Linux Mint 21.1 MATE, standard install from DVD. I have three hard drives in my system, 1 standard Linux system drive (with the FAT32 and ex4 partitions) and 2 data drives.

I've already created a backup image, saved to the larger data drive, and then restored that backup image to the larger drive I plan to use for my new system drive and used gparted to assign the unused space in the restored drive to the ex4 partition. The backup, restore and partition increase was all done in the same session of Rescuzilla.

All things being equal, if this was Windows, I'd be ready to swap out my smaller system drive for the larger one I just imaged and expect things to go perfectly well.

But this is my first try doing this in Linux, and there are obvious differences between the two OS's, the question is, having done the above, can I just swap out the smaller drive with the lager one, press the power button and have it all start up normally?

I ask because it took six hours to back-up and clone the new drive, largely because of some unexplained weirdness with Rescuzilla having issues with dual screens and a few other things before I got this all done with no apparent errors. I don't really want to go through that again.

I use my computer for my work, and that's a hell of a lot of time out of my day waiting for it to back up and such. If installing it messes up the new drive image, I'll have to take even more time cloning the system drive again and figuring out what I did wrong. I can be productive while I wait for an answer, and save any work to my data drives in the meantime.

I'm hoping the answer will be, "Yeah, just swap it out and go for it. It'll be fine." If not, well, at least I don't waste time trying and failing to install the new drive.

Now, back to work! Thanks in advance!

[AndyMH]

I've already created a backup image, saved to the larger data drive, and then restored that backup image to the larger drive I plan to use for my new system drive and used gparted to assign the unused space in the restored drive to the ex4 partition. The backup, restore and partition increase was all done in the same session of Rescuzilla.

Yes, it should work. You took an image backup of the existing drive to a third drive and then restored the backup to your new drive. The only thing you CANNOT do is try to boot with the original drive and the clone in the system at the same time. You have two identical drives, it will confuse BIOS, which one does it boot?

I did the same recently with foxclone, swapping 512GB nvme drive for 1TB nvme drive. Only one nvme drive slot, so I took a backup to another drive, swapped the nvme drives over and cloned the backup to the new drive.

I'm the foxclone dev, but rescuezilla should work equally well. Shasheem (the rescuezilla dev) and I correspond occasionally.