How to clone / move entire Fedora installation onto larger disk with minimal changes to the system?
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## Scenario
I have an SSD in my computer (250GiB), with both
/boot
and /
//home
partitions on it.
I'd like to move that into a new M.2 NVME drive which is much larger (1TiB).
The distro I'm using is Fedora 37.
my /etc/fstab
looks like this:
#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Tue Jun 28 05:26:41 2022
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk/'.
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info.
#
# After editing this file, run 'systemctl daemon-reload' to update systemd
# units generated from this file.
#
UUID=5ed1bf26-ab2f-4e5a-ab5e-d2d56f5f3803 / btrfs subvol=root,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=a14f6d42-3a64-4f96-856c-51e0f4344481 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=5ed1bf26-ab2f-4e5a-ab5e-d2d56f5f3803 /home btrfs subvol=home,compress=zstd:1 0 0
lsblk
looks like this:
NAME KNAME PATH TYPE MODEL STATE RO RM HOTPLUG FSTYPE FSVER LABEL PTTYPE PARTTYPE PARTTYPENAME PARTLABEL PARTFLAGS SIZE FSSIZE FSAVAIL
sda sda /dev/sda disk Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB running 0 0 0 dos 232.9G
├─sda1 sda1 /dev/sda1 part 0 0 0 ext4 1.0 dos 0x83 Linux 0x80 1G 973.4M 608.1M
└─sda2 sda2 /dev/sda2 part 0 0 0 btrfs fedora_localhost-live dos 0x83 Linux 231.9G 231.9G 108.3G
zram0 zram0 /dev/zram0 disk 0 0 0 7.5G
**Note:** both /
and /home/
are subvolumes of the same partition! They're not on individual partitions as such.
## Problem
How would I go about doing this, with minimal interruption to my work time?
I thought I'd boot up a live distro with gparted
and then move partitions over, but since there are UUIDs scattered all over my current setup, I think I might run into problems, also I'm not sure this is the preferred method.
As a *bonus*, I suppose, I'd like a swap partition on my hard drive, that is larger than my current amount of RAM (8GB). Currently, I only use ZRAM, but I'd like to have a swap partition that is larger (perhaps twice in size) than my current amount of RAM, so that I can safely put my computer into hibernation. Also, more swap would be quite good for my VMs, and I'm struggling running more than around two VMs, currently.
This is roughly how I think I should go about this:
1. I thought I'd clone the current layout onto my 1TB drive, however I'm not sure which tool to use would be best, leaving a large chunk of the drive empty.
2. I'd then create a swap partition towards the end of the un-allocated space.
3. And then enlarge my /dev/sda2
partition, so that I can use the entirety of my drive, etc.
Please advise the order of procedure (step 0 would be to create a backup, obviously), as well as the tools I should perhaps try out, etc.
Asked by polemon
(11921 rep)
Feb 6, 2023, 03:46 PM
Last activity: Apr 28, 2025, 12:03 PM
Last activity: Apr 28, 2025, 12:03 PM