I've recently decided to upgrade my main PC, running Debian Jessie, to use
SSDs instead of HDDs. ...
The machine is a self-built circa 2009 machine with an Intel Core i7-920
processor, 24GB of RAM ... 1 500GB disk which
contained the whole filesystem except /opt with multiple partitions, and 1
1TB disk which is mounted on /opt.
The migration was easy for the /opt disk -- just install the SSD, partition
it, create an ext4 filesystem on it, mount it somewhere temporary, copy
everything over from the /opt harddisk, and modify fstab ...
I've got a feeling though that the main disk is going to be a bit more of a
challenge, and that is what I want advice about. I'm thinking I should boot
from a live image and effect the copy there so that the disk is not mounted
and in active use. Is that along the right lines or is there a better way?
The replacement SSD is 960GB where the original hard disk is 500GB. Would
you recommend a dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd (or whatever it turns out to
be), or a cp -r command like I used for the /opt disk, or some other way to
execute the migration?
One complication is when I originally partitioned the 500GB disk I may have
overdone it a bit. I've got separate partitions for /boot, /usr, /home,
/tmp, /var, swap space and the root partition. I now consider that I
overdid that and would ideally like to collapse /usr, /tmp and /var into
the (correpondingly bigger) root partition, ie not have separate partitions
for them and end up with root, /boot and /home (BIOS is too old for UEFI so
using MBR booting so /boot partition makes sense). But, if trying to do so
is going to make life significantly harder, I can accept not doing so --
but I do want to make full use of the available space on the new device so
the partitions will not be the same size as they were.
What other things should I be concerned about (for example the discussion
about ping using capabilities that was on this list a day or two back)? Oh,
and speaking of MBR, as I was a paragraph ago, anything I should watch out
for when trying to make the SSD bootable?
And anything else I should bear in mind when migrating to SSDs on a system
that was originally installed on HDDs?