Move Boot drive to smaller drive Rsync? or?

Support and Help
1

I’m looking to move my sda boot drive to a smaller drive ( moving 2TB only <140 meg used to 160 meg drive)

As I understand it I can not use clonezilla to do this, can only clone to same or larger.

I’ve used rsync to copy my non boot sdb to a new drive but I’m not sure if I can use rsync to copy the boot drive and still have the system boot off this new smaller drive.

or is there another option?

TIA
Tim

1 Like
2

Do you mean to fit 140GB on a 160GB disk?
How many partitions?
One ESP and one System partition?

You could use Gparted in a “Try Ubuntu” live session to reduce the partitions to 140GB
Then Gparted (or clonezilla) has an option to copy partitions (one at a time)

3

There is an option in Clonezilla to clone a larger drive to a smaller one. There are lots of caveats, read the documentation.

Alternatively use QT-fsarchiver.

4

I typically suggest new install, particularly now that systems are UEFI with gpt partitioning. If you clone drive, at minimum you have to reinstall grub boot loader, to have correct GUID/partuuid in UEFI boot as that is stored on motherboard.

I do new install, copy /home and run some scripts to update system and reinstall apps with the configuration I want. With larger RAM & ISO in RAM and install to SSD, full install is less than an hour.

5

From Fsarchiver quote:
(5th item down)
“Ability to restore the filesystem to a partition which is smaller than the original”

Here’s what I use
Clone:
sudo ./fsarchiver -j6 -o savefs ubuntu.fsa /dev/nvme0n1p4
Restore:
sudo ./fsarchiver restfs ubuntu.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/nvme0n1p4

Change ‘dev’ to what device you have. Also change ‘./fsarchiver’ to point to location of your archiver.

1 Like
6

tea-for-one

Oops , yes gig not meg

7

Thanks everyone, I’ll look into the above options.

I did a clean install of ubuntu 22.04 and the system is throwing errors and hanging.
the prior ubuntu (20.) was what ever version was available in 2009 (ubuntu 8?) and was an upgraded thru versions 12, 14 ,16, 18, and to 20 and never had any errors.

I’m not sure but I think 22 cannot run on a very old system like the Dell Optiplex 360 that I’m using, I think it a possible chip set issue.
so to test this.
I still have the 2TB with the version 20 on it and I want test the old ubuntu version to see if the errors go away. if they do I’ll need to clone the 2tb to the smaller drive.

I think there is still code from the past versions that were left on the 2tb drive that handled the older chip sets, but what do I know.