Hi all,
I am about to replace my venerable old PC due a semi-failing motherboard.
I bought a new motherboard, new RAM, new CPU (AMD Ryzen 5 3600), new SSD (WD Black 500Gb NVMe).
I have read that cloning a partition with dd onto the new SSD does not obtain the best performance. Is it true? Notice that the old boot partition was on SSD too (a 120Gb Samsung 840 Evo).
My /home was on a mechanical drive, instead (320Gb Seagate Barracuda).
What would you suggest as procedure to migrate the OS and data to the new system? And what do I have to do so that my old Tumbleweed installation “adatps” to the new hardware?
Anything that comes to mind that I should be aware of?
Also, depending how your partitions are set up, I would still keep boot and root on SSD and home on HDD, you can choose what to clone where during cloning process. Personally, 500GB SSD fills up rather quickly and I would upgrade the HDD to larger capacity too if I had the option.
From experience usually I have to wipe out the contents in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and run
mkinitrd
as the super user usually makes everything to work fine.
Which option will take you more time (and effort to spend):
To setup your new machine from scratch (i.e. new OS installation) and then move your data from the old to the new system (via network, USB-drives, transferring data drives from old to new machine, …) OR
To work out how to clone your current machine (clonezilla
may be an option) to your new one (plus later on to find out why things do not work as expected and how to fix these issues)?
I think I will try option two, then if I experience problems I’ll go back to option 1. I have already made all the work needed for option 1 not so long ago (due to problems in my installation) and I’m not so keen of doing it all again.
Cloning disks is rather routine here. I’m never keen on new installs. Last was about five days ago, three in the past 30 days. The only thing that jumps at me as important for cloning in this potential migration from old SSD to new NVME is to first rebuild initrd(s) with included nvme support. NVME is on quite a different bus than an ordinary SATA SSD. Instead of /dev/sda you’ll see /dev/nvme0n1. The new motherboard/CPU should be able to boot the old SSD directly without modification, but may need network and/or graphics reconfiguration once booted, and possibly won’t boot at all without rebuilding initrds first if the old PC had an Intel CPU.
For the past two decades, Dfsee, in no small part because of its activity logging I use for disk and partition inventory, and author and user base support.
I’ve never installed to BTRFS, so have had no need to know to what extent DFSee may or may not support it.
When it clones, it quite literally clones sectors, not files or filesystems per se, so I wouldn’t expect any difference between source and original regardless what filesystem(s) is/are on (a) partition/disk. Same goes for partition copy as opposed to partition clone, which differs only by combining the process of partition create with partition clone. Support for various file operations on other filesystems may well be absent for BTRFS. I don’t use it for any kind of file operations, but have occasionally used it for MBR sector editing.
It automatically handles extended partition sizing to accommodate desired logical partitions - no need to give any thought to extended sizing.
For more info on the extent of BTRFS “support” you could contact the author directly or via its support mailing list.