I have a newly installed system, where I studied and learnt this OS. Now I would like to copy it to an SSD disk and boot from there. But I would like to shrink the HDD because its capacity is much bigger and retain the old one with an option to choose which installation will be booted.
Here is the output of the parted list:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 525MB 524MB fat16 boot, esp
2 525MB 1000GB 1000GB lvm
How can I do the shrink, the copy, the multi-boot and finally set the SSD as the default boot drive?
Thanks in advance.
If it were my system, I would just do a new install. And then I would copy over “/home” from the old disk to the new.
For the new install, use the same EFI partition as you are currently using. I suggest that you make a backup of that. Everything important is in “/boot/efi/EFI/opensuse”. So maybe make a new directory “/boot/efi/EFI/old” and copy everything to there before the new install.
The new install will replace those files in the EFI partition, but it won’t touch the new directory that you created for the backup. Hmm, make sure that you do not tell the installer to reformat the EFI partition. The boot menu should give you a choice to boot either system.
The boot menu (from grub) should give you a choice of which to boot.
Or you could copy back the old EFI entries to boot the old system. Or you could use “efibootmgr” to create a new boot entry with the copied boot files, and use the BIOS boot menu to select.
On my systems, I can use F12 while booting to get the BIOS boot menu. On one system, I choose “opensuse-secureboot” (which is the default) for normal booting. Or I chose “betasuse” to use an alternative UEFI boot path. You can use “efibootmgr -c …parameters…” to set an alternative boot for the BIOS. I originally setup that alternative for beta testing, and just kept the alternative name around.
I have done many transfers of systems on a HDD to SSD but always to a same target size or greater
I use dd to cope the entire disk and dd to write it back
I always write to copy as an .iso to a backup device before copying the .iso to the new target
Seems odd wanting to have the same install on both the SSD and the old HDD
If you make an iso of the HDD and write it to the SSD, when done then
Just boot with the SSD and test.
Add back the HDD as second device
Boot the OS SSD and run a grub update
I’m pretty sure it would work, but still - why?
Just because that’s what I do. Backup - you don’t have to, you could write it directly to the new SSD
Of course this done using a live system
How? you simply apply the instruction in the dd command
For example it might look something like:
Where sda is the device you are copying and /media/TOURO is the mounted external device you are backing up to - and laptop.iso is the file dd writes
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/TOURO/laptop.iso
That’s a pretty basic outline
Because I do this and have done this for many friends and customers, I always make a backup and keep that for a good while, until it’s certainly not going to be needed again.
If the disk you are copying is failing you can use for example ( ionice -c3 ddrescue ) that would go something like:
But you are not making an “ISO file” here at all. You are copying the contents of /dev/sda to a file inside a file system (of an unspecified type). But that file does no contain an ISO 9660 file system then. The fact that you use a suffix of .osi in it’s name does NOT make it an “ISO file”.
So, what you do is OK, but I was (and maybe other people will also) very confused by your talking about “ISO file”.
So, I don’t understand two things. First, why should I use the dd to create an ISO? it isn’t a CD burner…
Second, how will be bootable the old HDD and the new SSD system, and how can I choose at start, which one I want to load?
Once you dd the image to the SSD and place it in the machine, in place of your old HDD
It should just boot, assuming the SSD is set in the same place in the bios/efi as was the HDD
Once that is up and running. Adding the old HDD back and booting the SSD system, and runing a grub update and all should be good
I’m a little concerned that you don’t understand any of this because dd is not for a novice - no offence
I don’t understand why everybody want to replace the HDD with SSD when I don’t want to do that.
I would like to use both the disks and alternatively loading a system.
Hm, maybe you should expliaan better then what exactly you want. Which disk should contain what and what should be running using what disk (partitions) in what multi-boot situation.
I now start to understand that you are trying to achieve something that is really unusual to most here and that thus you get advises not applicabale to your goal.
I also had the impression that you wanted to replace your revolving disk mass storage by a solid state one and then later use your old revolving one in the same system for some other operating system to multi-boot with. Man people do this to speed up their system. But that now seems not to be the case, although I have no idea what you are after.
Thanks to you and to the entire community here for trying to understand my problem. Here is the first sentences of the original post:
*I have a newly installed system, where I studied and learnt this OS. Now I would like to copy it to an SSD disk and boot from there.
But I would like to shrink the HDD because its capacity is much bigger and retain the old one with an option to choose which installation will be booted. *
Here is the details:
I have an laptop with an HDD and an SSD.
I want to do some experiments with installing openSuse.
I do it on the HDD so I will not deteriorate the SSD with experiments.
Finally I have a working openSuse installation on my HDD. Why should I throw it out? I will keep that as a type of backup for emergency situations.
When I achieved my system is OK on the HDD (the OS, the applications, the net, the IDE, the VPN and lot more) I would copy it to the SSD. Before that shrink it to the size of the SSD.
I got an advice not copy but do everything from scratch (now I am in the third week) and create a fresh install on SSD
Regardless of the copy/new install resolution I want to keep the two installed OS. I dont want to throw out my HDD.
So finally I would like to make a dual boot system, and i would like to choose which OS will be loaded at the machine start.
This above was the meaning of my opening post. I am sorry if that was not totally clear.
I would replace the disk with the solid state (in the way suggested) to create your day to day system (where you go web-surfing, create your documents, visit your bank, etc.).
As you are looking at a test system, I would install a new fresh system on your disk. Maybe the same openSUSE version, maybe another one (Leap when you have now TW, or v.v., or even 15.3 alpha) and you can redo that with other versions at your will in the future.
Thus in fact two complete different systems, where the only connection is that they multi-boot on the same hardware (so you can only run one at the time) and maybe, you mount file systems from one (read-only for protection or not) on the other when wanted.
I am not sure what details you expect from the situation as you painted it for us, but booting one of the two at will and expecting that everything is the same will not be true because your user(s) will have changed things in their home directories, that will not be found on the other system. Thus within no time both systems will differ from each other at least at the user level.
The above set-up will also get rid of having the same UUIDs on the file systems of both disks and of course “shrinking” or similar is not needed, because your new installation will be done as wanted.
Edit:
Take care, I only joined this thread because of the mentioning of ISO file systems being used (which wasn’t the case), Thus I have not read about all the solutions on how to switch disks. Specialy the fact that the new disk is smaller then the old one takes careful attendance.
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