Re: Copying one drive to a smaller one.

[David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com>]

On 5/8/22 18:54, paulf@quillandmouse.com wrote:
> Folks:
>
> 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?


Resizing and moving a Debian instance from a 500 GB drive to a 250 GB 
drive requires a lot of expertise.


I would take the KISS approach -- backup the system configuration files 
and data, remove the 500 GB drive, install the 250 GB drive, do a fresh 
install onto the 250 GB drive, and reconfigure/ restore.


David