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

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.

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…

You can clone your SSD on Linux from the CLI: [image] Recommended Method for System Backup Ask Fedora 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 exis…

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 cl…

[image] Joey Dell D5420 F42WSGnome: 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). [image] Joey Dell D5420 F42WSGnome: So I’d need to mount the new bigger internal SSD…

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

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 tak…

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.

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

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 gene…

Changing hard drive

Ask Fedora

tqcharm (Mike B.) November 27, 2025, 2:28pm 4

You can clone your SSD on Linux from the CLI:

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).

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Changing hard drive

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