Cloning a dual boot system from HDD to SSD
- by Alex
I'm planning on replacing my laptop's HDD with a 256GB SSD, but I have a dual-boot (12.04 and Windows 7) setup and I'd like to be able to directly migrate Ubuntu over without having to reinstall and lose all of my settings. GParted reports the following partition setup on my HDD. I am, of course, able to modify it if necessary.
/dev/sda1 (NTFS) 66.92 out of 200.00 MB used
I'm honestly not sure what this partition is for. Maybe for Windows 7 system files? I'm hesitant to mess with it. (edit; it turns out it is a partition for Windows recovery files in the event of OS corruption, so I don't want to remove it. Plus it also appears to be a major pain to remove anyways)
/dev/sda2 (NTFS) 116.35 out of 339.06 GB used (boot)
This partition is the C:/ drive on my Windows installation. I don't use it on my Ubuntu installation, except it is the boot partition and thus has grub on it.
/dev/sda4 (extended)
> /dev/sda5 (ext4) 14.49 out of 91.34 GB used
> /dev/sda6 (linux-swap) 5.92 GB
These are my Ubuntu partitions. /sda5 contains my documents and all of the files I use on Ubuntu, and (as far as I know) the system files for Ubuntu itself (it's the partition I created when prompted by the Live-DVD installer). /sda6 is, of course, the swap partition which I only need for hibernation (6GB of RAM).
/dev/sda3 (NTFS) 9.89 out of 14.75 GB used
This is an annoying partition that Lenovo created to store some drivers and files that I might need later on. For example, it allows me to use OneKeyRecovery for a quick factory recovery if absolutely necessary, not sure if that'll work on an SSD. It also contains not-so-important files for bloatware installation.
In total, my HDD only has about 150GB of files on it so it should fit comfortably on the SSD. The problem is, I want to exactly migrate my files, partitions, OSes, MBR, etc. from my HDD to my SSD and I'm not quite sure how to do this. I've seen CloneZilla referenced before, but I'm not all too experienced and the documentation for it quite frankly seems a bit like a foreign language to me.
So, put simply, is there any way I can exactly clone this HDD to an SSD without a massive headache? Also, if it matters, I'll probably be using an external hard drive case (as recommended in online tutorials) to externally attach the SSD to my laptop during the cloning process due to the lack of two hard drive slots in the machine.
