I finally have the budget to build my first NAS and upgrade my desktop PC. I have used Linux for quite some time, but am far from an expert.
One of the steps is to move my M.2 NVME system drive (1TB) from my desktop to my NAS. I want to replace it with a bigger NVME drive (2TB). My current motherboard only has a single M.2 slot, that’s why I bought a M.2 enclosure.
My goal is to put my new drive into the enclosure, clone my whole system disk onto it and then replace the old drive. At first I found several posts about using clonezilla to clone the whole drive, but some posts mentioned it not working well with btrfs (/ and /home subvolume), which is the bulk of my drive.
I have some ideas how I might to pull it off. My preliminary idea is:
- clone my boot partition with clonezilla
- use btrfs-clone or moving my butter to transfer the btrfs partition
- resize the partitions with gparted (and add swap?)
The two aspects I’m uncertain about are:
- UUIDs
- fstab
I plan to replace the old drive, so the system will not have two drives with the same UUID. If the method results in a new UUID I need to edit fstab.
As you can see I’m not sure how to proceed. Maybe I can just use clonezilla or dd to clone my whole drive? If someone has experience with such a switch or is just a lot for familiar with the procedures, I would love some tips and insight.
Thanks for reading.
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EDIT: Thinking about how to do it, might have actually taken longer than the procedure itself. For anyone in a similar situation, I was able to replace the drive with these steps:
- clone the whole drive (new drive has a bigger capacity) with clonezilla
- physically switch the drives
- boot into a live medium and resized the btrfs partition on the new drive with gparted
- boot into the main system and adjust the filesystem size with
sudo btrfs filesystem resize max /
With two NVME drives (even though one was in a USB M.2 enclosure) everything took about 30 minutes. About 300 gigs of data were transferred. I haven’t found any problems with the btrfs partition thus far. Using dd like others recommended might work as well, but I didn’t try that option.
When you say system drive this will also have your efi system partition (usually FAT-formated as that’s the only standard all UEFI implementations support), maybe also a swap partition (if not using a swap file instead) etc… so it’s not just copiying the btrfs partition your system sits on.
Yes clonezilla will keep the same UUID when cloning (and I assume your fstab properly uses UUIDs to identify drivees). In fact clonezilla uses different tools depending on filesystem and data… on the lowest level (so for example on unlocked encrypted data it can’t handle otherwise) clonezilla is really just using dd to clone everything. So cloning your disk with clonezilla, then later expanding the btrfs partition to use up the free space works is an option
But on the other hand just creating a few new partitions, then copying all data might be faster. And editing /etc/fstab with the new UUIDs while keeping everything else is no rocket science either.
The best thing: Just pick a method and do it. It’s not like you can screw up it up as long if your are not stupid and accidently clone your empty new drive to your old one instead…
