Swapping out an old 2TB pcie 3 drive for a newer 2TB pcie 4 drive.
I was leaning towards using dd, after shrinking the partition on the source drive so it doesn’t also ‘copy’ all the empty space.
Have you done this recently? What was your method?
Or is there a CachyOS/kde tool I may be unaware of?
Adjust partition size if neccessary, then
cp /dev/sda /dev/sdb.Clonezilla Live USB ftw
Gparted works great as well, just umount drive and copy
Reinstalling because I use ZFS.
Honestly dd is perfect. Like you say, shrink the partition down first, DD to the new disc, swap discs. That’s it.
btrfs device add /dev/newdrive /
btrfs device remove /dev/olddrive
I have a bunch of scripts to install my systems. Anything important is already backed up to my storage system.
Do you use any fancy tools like Ansible or just a series of bash scripts?
Anything important is already installed elsewhere, so I just install clean.
For my personal workstation, it’s such a rare thing I always use that an excuse to start from scratch again. If it’s like a business system or something, usually build a new system and migrate data and services to it gradually.
I so rarely do in-place upgrades of system drives unless it’s a recovery or something.
True. Starting with a fresh install can be more of a performance boost than buying a new drive. Add them together though and your computer is going to feel like future tech. I’d also just reinstall, unless its a server or a pain to rebuild.
Pretty much this. I’d copy anything I want to keep onto a temporary drive, (cloud storage, a USB drive, second SSD, etc), then use it as an excuse to refresh my install. Then just copy everything from that temporary storage after my new install is finished.
rsync
Out of curiosity, what are you doing that the difference between the two is woth that effort? Or is the pcie3 drive bottom of the barrel maybe?
Yeah, exactly the latter. I noticed the other day that the thin copper layer that sits across the top of this drive had just popped off!
Last time I did this I used btrfs.
Add the new drive to the system, create partitions, add the new volume and then remove the old one, btrfs moves all the blocks to the new drive.
The ESP partition is small enough and FAT- enough to just use
cp.Huh.
I never thought of using that feature of btrfs that way. Brilliant.
Yeah, I think i’ll give this a go
I would add that a slightly better way would be to do it in raid1 mode instead of single mode.
That way you can move the data over by running a balance, instead of by removing the old volume, which would survive the process being interrupted by a reboot or whatever else.
Then after the balance you can remove the old volume and turn the new one back into a single volume.
disk destroyer? I prefer just formatting and
rsync-ing things. Unless I care about preserving metadata.rsync -aftw
