What is the best tool migrate data from a magnetic drive to SSD?
Gparted - copy and paste each partition A–>B
What other tools make it easier? ‘Image Magic’ was recommended.
Which apple is the best apple?
Which car is the best car?
Which sex is the best sex?
Which government is the best government?
Which distro is the best distro?
Answers to such questions depend on your education, needs, preferences, familiarities, biases, habits and more. So it is also for disk migration tools.
I migrated from rotating rust to SSD on one multi-multiboot PC on day before yesterday. It involved 28 partitions to be created and/or migrated. All but the first four and the last I cloned with DFSee, after creating all 28 in MBR format with DFSee, most at different sizes from the source. I used resize2fs to update the filesystems to the destination partition sizes. I used mkfs.extN to create the 5 new partitions. I updated the bootloaders and fstabs with MC’s internal editor. I updated bootloaders from the openSUSE 13.1 Grub shell. The only OS that didn’t boot first try was due to a filesystem label typo in an fstab, an easy fix from “emergency” boot from a different OS. I did everything using only the two “disks” involved, no USB stick, no OM disc, no network boot, no third HD. I cloned or created six partitions first, test booted with only the SSD connected next, then finished the work after reconnecting the original with the SATA cables swapped, the new SSD as drive 0.
I’ve been using DFSee for close to two decades. It’s familiar, regardless of which OS I boot. It WFM, so I have no need to try other methods. YMMV.
I just looked again at gparted, and I don’t see where you got the idea that you would be able to copy and paste a partition. Just don’t see it there.
Easiest way is to use dd or ddrescue. There are switches to use but I’m not up on all of them, so hoping someone more knowledgeable will chime in to help you.
I’ve used gparted like that before. I cut and paste each partition in order. It works, but it’s slow.
Thanks for the info.
Clonezilla seems to be the right tool, the simplest. Has anyone else used it? Experiences?
Should work
Note that often when going to a different drive you may want to change partition sizes because drive is different size. Cloning is not the best tool to change partition sizes. Since cloning is just a direct binary copy of sectors it is about as fast as the hardware can go.
I forgot to mention another key reason for using DFSee is its logger is part of my inventory system for my PCs and their disks and the OSes installed on them.