Re: Copying one drive to a smaller one.
paulf@quillandmouse.com composed on 2022-05-08 21:54 (UTC-0400):
> Situation: I have a 500G boot drive (root, swap, home) I'd like to copy
> to a new 250G drive which must then also be bootable (yes, there's
> enough room). This are EFI drives. I can use "dd", but I don't know
> the proper parameters, and as I understand it, copying a 500G to a 250G
> drive is Bad(tm). I could use "rsync", but I don't think the second
> 250G drive will boot just because I copied the files over to it. I
> suspect I would have an additional step needed to make the drive
> bootable.
> Can someone outline the proper procedure here?
rsync gets the files, once required partitioning and formatting is done, but
doesn't configure bootloader. You can run efibootmgr to set the new ESP up, or
select the new ESP as priority within EFI BIOS setup (if it works as it should).
dd can be safely used only if target space is equal to or larger than source. If
the old drive is partitioned, you might be able to dd individual partitions that
fit, but your situation is a clear case to prefer rsync.
--
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based on faith, not based on science.
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!
Felix Miata
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