Changing hard drive

[joeyjonnson (Joey Dell D5420 F42WSGnome)]

Sorry for the beginner question …

I have a Dell D5420 laptop with 1TB SSD. I have just noticed 991GB are used so I am out of space and can’t import photos.

What is the basic process of moving to a bigger SSD? Will I need a total reinstall of Fedora Workstation?

thanks

[ytrium (Vanadium)]

By far, the easiest way will be to reinstall the operating system.

Alternatively, ask yourself whether you really need to keep 1 TB of pictures on the internal drive of the laptop. You could work with portable removable storage for archiving the older photo’s.

[joeyjonnson (Joey Dell D5420 F42WSGnome)]

I don’t have 1TB of pictures, I just have a lot, it was just the import of pictures which caused me to notice the space used.

I do need all photos on the machine, I have stuff archived on other drives in fire safe.

What is the process to change hard drive, I assume there’s no ‘clone’ like I had on Mac to get everything set up, extensions, settings etc? I am very nervous of doing this as I just finally got everything set up and running nicely!

PS - Vanadium - Are you a GrapheneOS user?

[tqcharm (Mike B.)]

You can clone your SSD on Linux from the CLI:

Recommended Method for System Backup

If you want to go the old way of creating a clone of the existing drive on a new drive with at least the same capacity (which could be swapped in case the existing one fails), you can boot a Fedora Workstation Live ISO, and clone the entire disk from the CLI: sudo dd if=/dev/<your-existing-drive> of=/dev/<your-backup-drive> bs=64K conv=noerror,sync status=progress As always, remember that when used incorrectly, dd can destroy data irreversibly. For creating disk or partition image files via G…

Afterwards you’d need to increase the size of your (root or data) partition, which I think it could be performed with GNOME Disks for BTRFS partitions as well IIRC (still being run from a live session).

[joeyjonnson (Joey Dell D5420 F42WSGnome)]

That’s scary and sounds above my pay grade, but may be feasible if I am careful and have clear instructions.
So that would be a CLONE - i.e. an identical 100% exact copy? If so that would be very handy.

So I’d need to mount the new bigger internal SSD (somehow), then use the terminal command to clone my internal to the new internal, then once complete, swap the hardware, and I could boot up and login just as before, no changes other than a bigger internal drive, is that right?

thanks

[tqcharm (Mike B.)]

@joeyjonnson

So that would be a CLONE - i.e. an identical 100% exact copy? If so that would be very handy.

Yes, that’s an exact copy (including disk and partition identifiers etc).

@joeyjonnson

So I’d need to mount the new bigger internal SSD (somehow), then use the terminal command to clone my internal to the new internal, then once complete, swap the hardware, and I could boot up and login just as before, no changes other than a bigger internal drive, is that right?

Yes, with the caveat that the dd command shouldn’t be run from the OS installed on your old SSD, but rather a Fedora Workstation live USB (or similar) should be booted, then the dd copy performed.

@joeyjonnson

That’s scary

The less scary option is to use GNOME Disks from a live ISO, but for that you’d need a third drive, given that GNOME Disks only creates disk images. So basically create a disk image of the old SSD to a temporary drive with at least 1TB free space, then restore the created image to the new SSD. The time needed to do the operation is doubled.

[joeyjonnson (Joey Dell D5420 F42WSGnome)]

Great, in that case I think that sounds doable, even for me. (He says feigning confidence )

I have a very old Dell business laptop running Fedora but nothing else on it, maybe that could do the dd command, or are you saying I can do it with my current dell laptop but only if booted from a LiveUSB rather than from the internally installed FedoraWS OS?

How would I ‘mount’ the new drive to the machine?

thanks again, will be great if i can avoid a complete install and setup again

[tqcharm (Mike B.)]

Actually, there’s no need for the drives to be mounted (neither source, nor destination disk). I will edit my above posts to reflect the change. You can use CLI commands or GNOME Disks to identify the two devices.

Yes, you can run the command from your old laptop, but prepare for the process to take a lot of time. Best ran overnight (process might still not be finished in the morning though).

EDIT: better run the command from your current laptop via live ISO, in which case your old SSD can stay there until you’ve finished the operations.

[tqcharm (Mike B.)]

One more thing: make sure you don’t mistakenly reverse the input and output devices, as that would lead to irreversible data loss.

If you’d like to go into the details of the dd utility, ArchLinux has a detailed wiki page with instructions.

[augenauf (Flo)]

Whatever you do, make sure you have a solid back up of important stuff (home dir and maybe /etc).

[coonmanx (Jim Coonradt)]

Excuse me for bringing this up because OP said he wanted everything on the machine. But an easy way to add storage would be to use an external hard drive. Storage capacity could then be doubled in an instant. If that is not what Joey wants then that is fine. But I am one of those people that in general looks for the easiest solution. Of course for my son the cloning of a hard drive would be trivial…

[joeyjonnson (Joey Dell D5420 F42WSGnome)]

Thanks, yes I have a 1TB drive in safe, I run Pika to it once a week, so backup is good thanks