My current situation is:
Now I want to install an 80GB SSD and move Ubuntu to it. AFAIK I need to:
fstab to mount the SSD as /How do I do the second? And what do I need to do about Grub?
You want to copy the FILES, not the whole partition ( including its free space ), so you don't need to resize the partition first. Boot from the livecd and mount both the HD and SSD ( after formatting a partition on the SSD of course ), then copy all of the files over:
sudo cp -Tax /media/hd /media/ssd
Use the correct names for the hd and ssd mount points of course. Then you just need to edit the /etc/fstab on the ssd to point to the new fs UUID ( you can look it up with blkid ). Finally you need to install grub on the ssd.
sudo -s
for f in sys dev proc ; do mount --bind /$f /media/ssd/$f ; done
chroot /media/ssd
grub-install /dev/ssd
update-grub
Of course, use the correct device for /dev/ssd. The whole disk, not a partition number.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair
Finally reboot and make sure your bios is set to boot from the SSD.
Here is as good (for 2018) as easy how-to from 2013: http://www.sesser.eu/howtos/hdd2ssd.php by Markus Sesser.
But you should read 1st comment here about --exclude "sys" - thanks to @em2er !
It describes migration without booting from live CD. It also respects system dirs and uses rsync, noatime, nodiratime. Just do not forget to omit discard option - it is implemented via cron since Ubuntu 14.04.
Short plan from article:
partition and mount the SSD. I recommend single ext4 on gpt
cleanup source HDD
sync data (rsync)
tune fstab. Also if you will keep HDD in system then I recommend move /home onto SSD while keep user data (~/Video, ~/Audio, etc.) on HDD
install grub
I was able to do this migration successfully thanks to @psusi's instructions, however I observed one "gotcha."
After installing Grub on the new SSD, it still wouldn't boot - it was looking for the ramdisk image using the UUID of my old OS drive, which I had removed. Using the --recheck option fixed this:
$ grub-install --recheck /dev/ssd
This encourages grub to re-scan the BIOS, identify the new drive, and presumably use its UUID when passing the "root=" parameter to the kernel.
I tried to install Boot-Repair tool from instruction in the answer of this question on Ubuntu 20.04 (on installed version, not live) to check that everything will be fine on live version:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair
There was error:
Cannot add PPA: 'ppa:~yannubuntu/ubuntu/boot-repair'. ERROR: '~yannubuntu' user or team does not exist.
Instruction from here helped to me.
Below this instruction (How to install the Boot-Repair tool in an Ubuntu live disc):
sudo apt install software-properties-common; \
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) universe"; \
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair; \
sudo apt-get update; \
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair
When command:
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) universe"
was being executed there was the following warning:
W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net/yannubuntu/boot-repair/ubuntu focal InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 32B18A1260D8DA0B E: The repository 'http://ppa.launchpad.net/yannubuntu/boot-repair/ubuntu focal InRelease' is not signed. N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default. N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.
But it did not prevent installation of boot-repair. It was installed successfully.
Considering your HDD is /dev/sda and SSD is /dev/sdb and partitions are properly sized, you may use simple cp:
cp /dev/sdaX /dev/sdbY
Where X and Y are corresponding partition numbers.
However this method will copy 80GB of data and all sectors on your SSD will be marked as "occupied" initially.
