MX Linux Forum

Hello everyone,
I would like to migrate my current installation of MX18 from one SSD to another (different brand and size).
What would be the best approach? Would MX Snapshot do the job? I would like to ideally keep everything as-is.

Thanks for any hints.

Best regards, Jiri

edit: We're talking about mSata SSDs so I can't (easily) make both of them running at the same time.

WarhawkCZ wrote: Mon Aug 05, 2019 2:32 pm Hello everyone,
I would like to migrate my current installation of MX18 from one SSD to another (different brand and size).
What would be the best approach? Would MX Snapshot do the job? I would like to ideally keep everything as-is.

Thanks for any hints.

Best regards, Jiri

edit: We're talking about mSata SSDs so I can't (easily) make both of them running at the same time.

I don't know about mSata SSDs. My question is can you see them when booting from a live-usb? And how is your system formatted? UEFI? Root size? Home and other partitions etc?

Snapshot works well for this...

The reason I asked is I just did this going from a 120G to a 500G ssd. Mine was UEFI and I did this using Gpart to copy each partition from the 120G to the 500G. I did this one partition at a time since after each one except for the esp, I resized them to a larger size after each copy. This kept all UUID numbers the same so no changes on anything. Just remove the 120g drive and it rebooted just like it was still the 120G drive. Later I cleared the 120G.

Don't know if you can do this with your setup. Just a thought.

Snapshot would work, make sure you copy VirtualBox images if you have installed, snapshot excludes those by default.

Another way would be just to boot to Live USB copy all the stuff from one drive to another (create similar partitions and use rsync to sync all the files) then for a good measure reinstall GRUB and fix /etc/fstab to reflect the changes.

WarhawkCZ wrote: Mon Aug 05, 2019 2:32 pm Hello everyone,
I would like to migrate my current installation of MX18 from one SSD to another (different brand and size).
What would be the best approach? Would MX Snapshot do the job? I would like to ideally keep everything as-is.

Thanks for any hints.

Best regards, Jiri

edit: We're talking about mSata SSDs so I can't (easily) make both of them running at the same time.

Since you can't have both SSDs running at once you're either going to need to back up the contents of your home directory to an (internal or external) hard drive (using Lucky Backup or Grsync) and make a personal snapshot that excludes those directories, or if you have a large-capacity USB stick make a personal snapshot that includes the directories inside of home, but only if you don't have a lot of personal data files or big files. Either way, snapshot will do what you want: just burn the snapshot's ISO to your USB stick, change your SSDs, boot from the USB and install your own MX on the new SSD, then restore your personal data.

Or you could use clonezilla. Boot a Live MX and install clonezilla. If possible, connect new ssd via USB or other means, whatever is available, fire up clonezilla and do a disk to disk clone.

Clonezilla easily and reliably takes care of all steps and will not allow cloning a larger disk to a smaller, so it is safe in this instance. If you can not have both ssd disks available simultaneously, do an image clone to an ext4 formatted thumb drive (not preferred) or external hard disk (best option) first, then dump it back to the new SSD when installed.

Double up

Thank you everyone, I will try the snapshot feature first. It is for a collectible Thinkpad x301 (my portable typewriter) and the amount of home data is super small. I'll report back.

WarhawkCZ wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2019 1:38 am Thank you everyone, I will try the snapshot feature first. It is for a collectible Thinkpad x301 (my portable typewriter) and the amount of home data is super small. I'll report back.

In that case, and if your USB stick is 8GB or larger, a simple personal snapshot with no directories in /home excluded will probably do everything that you need. Create the snapshot ISO (by default they get stored in /home/snapshot), right-click on the md5 and sha512 files and select "Check data integrity" and if that says "OK" burn it to your USB stick using MX Live USB Maker, boot from the USB just to check that it includes your personal setup, power off and swap out the SSDs, boot from the USB again, and install to the new bigger SSD. VIola!

JayM wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2019 4:58 am

WarhawkCZ wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2019 1:38 am Thank you everyone, I will try the snapshot feature first. It is for a collectible Thinkpad x301 (my portable typewriter) and the amount of home data is super small. I'll report back.

In that case, and if your USB stick is 8GB or larger, a simple personal snapshot with no directories in /home excluded will probably do everything that you need. Create the snapshot ISO (by default they get stored in /home/snapshot), right-click on the md5 and sha512 files and select "Check data integrity" and if that says "OK" burn it to your USB stick using MX Live USB Maker, boot from the USB just to check that it includes your personal setup, power off and swap out the SSDs, boot from the USB again, and install to the new bigger SSD. VIola!

Jesus, this was smooth as silk. Process has just finished, zero problems. Even notes on my desktop remained in the position.
Utterly boring distro, no problems to deal with...

WarhawkCZ wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2019 4:38 pm Utterly boring distro, no problems to deal with...

Careful! That can lead to messing up your system out of sheer boredom because everything works so well, leaving you with nothing else to do. :)

Clonezilla easily and reliably takes care of all steps and will not allow cloning a larger disk to a smaller, so it is safe in this instance.

I used to use Clonezilla often. There's an option in advanced settings that allows use of smaller drives as long as the clone data will fit on the smaller drive as Clonezilla doesn't copy empty space of larger drive.

Since my question is very similar can I add this here?

I am about to migrate two of my computers this weekend from existing spinning hard drives to SSDs. Both of the old drives are in the 300gb size range with multiple partitions (root, home, data drive, swap), and the new SSDs are larger than the old drives.

I presume that booting from a live USB which has clonezilla is the best way to do that, while attaching the new SSD to an external enclosure temporarily. then use clonezilla disk to disk clone.

The reason I post this is that I ***always*** seem to have a devil of a time using Clonezilla. Rarely if ever do I seem to accomplish anything when I set out to use it, as the result almost uniformly ends up unbootable. And I then end up using the snapshot facility and then copying data separately and kick myself for trying Clonezilla in the first place.

Are there any "tricks" to using Clonezilla successfully that might help make this attempt more successful?

(Offered as a future reference point).

mSATA to USB adaptors are available, so it would be possible to have both disks active simultaneously.

Chris

@nathan2423 FWIW I recently migrated a HDD to SSD (same size). Tried direct copy using dd, cat, ddrescue and clonezilla, but all of them failed or hung. What worked was to make an image on a third drive with ddrescue and dd that to the SSD.
--Edit-- Clarification: I booted MX from live flash drive and tried to copy internal HDD to new SSD in usb external drive enclosure. Also tried clonezilla live flash drive.

@nathan: clonezilla has this nice ability to copy a drive to a bigger one, to scale. IOW, if you copy a 320GB HDD to a 512GB SSD, every partition gets its size multiplied by (512/320) and its content copied. Neat. I have not tried this in a long time and it was on a MBR-partitioned drive running windows XP. Clonezilla was then able to fix the NT bootloader. Not sure if this still works with GPT and Windows 10. If your source drive is linux only, i'd got for it. If needed you can always fix grub using "MX boot repair".

nathan2423 wrote: Tue Aug 13, 2019 8:08 amAre there any "tricks" to using Clonezilla successfully that might help make this attempt more successful?

If you haven't already, just try using the defaults, or if you need to be ultra-careful for fear of trashing your data, clone the entire disk to an image and use the resultant image as your source when doing an image dump back to a new disk.

My data is something like 670GB in size on a 1.6 TB partition, so it's not beneficial to use clonezilla. I simply have a luckybackup profile that takes care of saving my data to a removable USB HDD and I do a fresh install and do not format /home. I would follow by dumping the data back when I upgrade my drive, but for tiny installations, say 10-30GB, I'd definitely use clonezilla.

I use an older version of clonezilla, clonezilla-live-2.4.5-23-amd64. The interface is easier to work with, (for me anyway).
I helped a friend once trying to clone his laptop to a new ssd. It seemed to me that the bios wanted a specific number of partitions and for them to be a specific size. It wouldn't even let laptop boot into Clonezilla. It wouldn't boot into larger, fully partitioned, ssd. After getting exact size of each partition, cloning drive, re creating the exact partition structure on new ssd, and leaving unused space as unallocated, I could run Clonezilla, and it copied correctly, bios was happy, and it booted properly. After it booted I partitioned the unalocated space.

Thanks for the replies. Sounds like i am not the only one having problems with clonezilla.

It's kind of mysterious to me - I have read so much praise for it, but it seems much more finicky than it should be.

I would think if the new disk is going to be completely reformated by the cloning process, there would not be so much issue and it wouldn't be so difficult.

I am much more impressed with the interface of qt4fsarchiver, and i see that it has a clone hd option, but I wasn't able to get that working on last try either.

I will see if I can devote some time to playing with both options and report back.

I think that all Clonezilla does is provide a series of menu choices that configure dd with the proper command-line switches and options for you. It's possible that by studying the dd man page and documentation you can get a better understanding of what Clonezilla is doing. (I say "you", not me! )

JayM wrote: Tue Aug 13, 2019 10:07 pm I think that all Clonezilla does is provide a series of menu choices that configure dd with the proper command-line switches and options for you. It's possible that by studying the dd man page and documentation you can get a better understanding of what Clonezilla is doing. (I say "you", not me! )

I think there's a bit more than that. Also you can install and run clonezila on MX, you don't need a special disk for that.

One issue I've had with Clonezilla is that it needs to mount the backup partition itself and some OSs will automatically mount certain partitions as soon as they are detected meaning Clonezilla is unable to mount it. Thunar seems to do this too so MX has been particularly tricksy to run Clonezilla from. To get around this, I always run Clonezilla from a dedicated recovery flash drive running something like PartedMagic which doesn't mount drives until you ask it to.
Apart from this little issue, I've found Clonezilla to be very reliable for backups although I haven't used it so much for disk cloning.
Also it doesn't necessarily use dd although it can be specified to do so. For partition cloning it uses partclone by default.

sunrat wrote: Tue Aug 13, 2019 11:02 pmThunar seems to do this too so MX has been particularly tricksy to run Clonezilla from

Agreed, the default is to automount partitions, but a tool a provided to fix that.
Here's 3 ways to get to the GUI....
Click on MX-Menu > type "rem" without the quotation marks and click the result "Removeable Drives and Media"
or
Click on MX-Menu > mouse over Settings on the right, scroll down the list on the left to "Removeable Drives and Media"
or
Click on MX-Menu > at top of the menu box, click the spanner/gear icon (All Settings tooltip will show)

Remove as many check marks from the relevant boxes and close the window, All done!.

I remove them all on my systems because I don't want anything automounting, but on my Wifes, I enabled desktop icons because that's where she works from.

MX-Menu > Settings > Under Personal click Desktop > White space at bottom, scroll down, expand Removeable Devices and select or deselect to your liking and close.

That may work for removable drives. I use eSATA drives for backup which are external but detected as internal drives. It was a while ago as I ended up working from PartedMagic live which works great so became the final solution. I vaguely recall trying noauto parameters in fstab but still having complications.

Here's 3 ways to get to the GUI....

I was able to get to this from within Thunar also.
Click EDIT|PREFERENCES|ADVANCED tab|under volume management click CONFIGURE.

Sounds like Sunrat has hit on my problem. Had I read his post before trying my two computers tonight, maybe the result would have been different.

However I tried on both my two Lenovo notebooks, and for the 100th time I crashed and burned with Clonezilla.

I return here, however, to report SUCCESS and to sing the praises of my new discovery -- G4L !!!

https://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/

I found this, downloaded the very small iso and burned to a flash, booted from that flash and VOILA -- simple, direct, and successful clone - and none of Clonezilla's obtuseness!

I found it first on an old partedmagic cd I had from ten years ago -- that version worked too!

I ran the clone two ways: One computer I simply attached the new ssd to an external enclosure and left the original drive in place. On the other drive, I substituted the new SSD into the machine, and took the old drive and mounted it in an external enclosure. So I copied in opposite ways on the two different machines, but after copying (and on one machine swapping the hard drives) both machines booted immediately from the new ssd's.

With any luck I will never try to use CLonezilla ever again. G4L seems to me to be much more direct, much more simple, and so far -- foolproof --- two for two machines without the hint of an error.

I highly recommend anyone having problems with Clonezilla to give G4L a try!


Also given what Sunrat is saying, sounds like I need to delete clonezilla from my Mx system (and thus from my Mx snapshots). Sounds like every couple of years I am forgetting about these problems, trying to run Clonezilla from my MX snapshot flashdrive, and then crashing and burning all over again due to the problem Sunrat specifies.

It is interesting to consider that G4L might not have this issue and therefore might run better from my MX flash key, but I don't see a deb file or any way to install G4L in MX. Of course maybe if the problem is the automounting like mpav says, then G4L would have the same issue. I don't want to turn off automounting just for the very occasional clone operation.

So I presume you are running G4L as a live distro. I suspect if you run Clonezilla from a live dedicated recovery distro like PartedMagic or Clonezilla Live it may also work fine. They both appear to be similar programs.
G4L is still on the latest PartedMagic (and I'd guess all of them) according to the website so I might try it (from my slightly older PM) for my next backup.
I always prefer to do disk management, backups, and cloning from a purpose-built recovery distro anyway. It seems to uncomplicate things.

Yes sunrat that is what I am doing. Their iso downloads at a small 75mb size, and boots very fast from a usb stick. You're probably right that if I had used a live-boot clonezilla I would not have run into those problems.

I have always found the very talky screens on clonezilla very confusing. This G4L also has some "talkiness," in that it has a series of screens explaining the history of the program, and some options that let you connect to your network if you choose to do this over the network.

But once you get to the main option screens the heart of the cloning is very simple.

You choose the source, then choose the target, and then hit clone disk. None of this "clonezilla needs to mount this that and the other...."

The difference might be as simple as that the author of G4L seems to write better and more clear English. Or maybe it's just me and there seems to be something about G4L that I find it much more intuitive.

But of course everyones' tastes vary.

Any program with any kind of complexity is much easier to use once you know it and some are easier to know than others.
Good you finally got the job done anyway. That's the main thing!

Any program with any kind of complexity is much easier to use once you know it and some are easier to know than others.

From my experience with Clonezilla I think it's implied, by the interface and all the options available, that the user has the knowledge, (or will learn), to navigate, and select the desired/required option. I've never used G4L, but it sounds like a box cutter compared to Clonezilla, (which is more like a Swiss army knife), and that's good if all you need is a box cutter.