Primary HDD Upgrade

Got a new (refurbished) HDD for my HP-Compaq-Elite-8300-SFF computer this week. It arrived Thursday after ordering last weekend. I am going from 140GB drive to 2TB Hitachi refurbished drive from a Ebay offer that looked too cheap to pass up. Finally got to installing this AM on my system. Here is how I proceeded. Never having used clonezilla before I was unsure how to proceed.

After attempting to use clonezilla from the running system, admittedly a rookie mistake, I quickly realized that it needed to run in standalone mode from some boot media. I opted for the tuxboot  route (see link at bottom) to get myself setup with a clonezilla USB stick. Had to install some qt4-dev-tools and p7zip to satisfy the tuxboot compile. I pulled the tuxboot source and ran the "INSTALL" and done. It is literally so easy on linux that it made me feel sorry for windows users. Actually I do feel sorry for windows users on a regular basis since I am forced to use it in my professional life.

Next, I hooked up my new drive via my handy dandy "USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter" which I purchased several years ago. This device is basically able to turn most any drive into an external unit temporarily to perform utility work such as this.

I then booted into my clonezilla stick. A word to the wise here... Be patient! This is a USB stick not a SSD. Once clonezilla was running I selected the local disk to local disk options and the beginner route which saves you from having to answer all sorts of embarassing questions which you won't necessarily know the answers to without google access. It tells enough information to easily allow you to recognize which drive is which: things like drive size and manufacturer name are pretty obvious don't you think? Finally after selecting source and destination you are given the option to copy all the grub data for your multi boot and etc. I am really glad I opted into that by the way. More on how that worked out below. Finally, you answer a couple or three final "are you really sure" styled questions and away it went. Around thirty minutes later it reported total success.

Now on to the good part. I booted from my old drive one last time. I ran gparted and resized my existing "/home /var/log" partition on the new drive. Remember my new drive is still outboarded at this point. Of course gparted had no issues finding it and allowing me to make my partition adjustments.  I selected my outboarded drive and clicked on the last partition (the one mentioned above). Then in the menu I selected resize option under the "Partition" menu. Then you just grab the right edge of the partition and slurp it out to use all available new space and then you are ready to apply the changes and shortly you are done. So easy a child could do it.

Then I examined my existing partitions with this command:

$ sudo blkid -o full -s UUID
[sudo] password for tim:
/dev/sda1: UUID="9eb1921f-6915-483e-8075-e30f523259d8"
/dev/sdb1: UUID="D60AF86F0AF84DCD"
/dev/sdb2: UUID="B858F9F658F9B2EC"
/dev/sdb3: UUID="1C00FB3F00FB1F08"
/dev/sdb4: UUID="b8206de8-6008-4e87-9cb9-0237b41f9393"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="a8edae9f-8a8d-4b75-9c28-050269cc603d"
/dev/sdc5: UUID="76a4fd29-c4fb-4706-a669-4c0fb488f72b"
/dev/sdd1: UUID="D60AF86F0AF84DCD"
/dev/sdd2: UUID="B858F9F658F9B2EC"
/dev/sdd3: UUID="1C00FB3F00FB1F08"
/dev/sdd4: UUID="b8206de8-6008-4e87-9cb9-0237b41f9393"
$

Legend: Old - New

You should bear in mind that the roles of sdd and sdb are reversed now. But you see that clonezilla has preserved the UUID setup perfectly so no further piddling around with mount points or fstab was necessary. All I had to do was shutdown and shove the new drive into the machine and bam... DONE!

Look at this vast expanse of digital desert waiting to bloom with new and exciting content:

$ df -h /dev/sdb4
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb4       1.8T   40G  1.6T   3% /home
$

I love clonezilla.

Links:

tuxboot