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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Replacing M.2 system drive (btrfs) on motherboard with single slot (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I finally have the budget to build my first NAS and upgrade my desktop PC. I have used Linux for quite some time, but am far from an expert.

One of the steps is to move my M.2 NVME system drive (1TB) from my desktop to my NAS. I want to replace it with a bigger NVME drive (2TB). My current motherboard only has a single M.2 slot, that's why I bought a M.2 enclosure.

My goal is to put my new drive into the enclosure, clone my whole system disk onto it and then replace the old drive. At first I found several posts about using clonezilla to clone the whole drive, but some posts mentioned it not working well with btrfs (/ and /home subvolume), which is the bulk of my drive.

I have some ideas how I might to pull it off. My preliminary idea is:

clone my boot partition with clonezilla
use btrfs-clone or moving my butter to transfer the btrfs partition
resize the partitions with gparted (and add swap?)

The two aspects I'm uncertain about are:

UUIDs
fstab

I plan to replace the old drive, so the system will not have two drives with the same UUID. If the method results in a new UUID I need to edit fstab.

As you can see I'm not sure how to proceed. Maybe I can just use clonezilla or dd to clone my whole drive? If someone has experience with such a switch or is just a lot for familiar with the procedures, I would love some tips and insight.

Thanks for reading.

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EDIT: Thinking about how to do it, might have actually taken longer than the procedure itself. For anyone in a similar situation, I was able to replace the drive with these steps:

clone the whole drive (new drive has a bigger capacity) with clonezilla
physically switch the drives
boot into a live medium and resized the btrfs partition on the new drive with gparted
boot into the main system and adjust the filesystem size with sudo btrfs filesystem resize max /

With two NVME drives (even though one was in a USB M.2 enclosure) everything took about 30 minutes. About 300 gigs of data were transferred. I haven't found any problems with the btrfs partition thus far. Using dd like others recommended might work as well, but I didn't try that option.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I had a similar case.
My minipc has a microSD card slot and I figured if it could be done for a RPI, why not for a mini PC? :P

After a few months I bought a new m2nvme but I didn't want to start from scratch (maybe I should've looked into nix?)
So what I did was sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=1024k status=progress
And that worked perfectly!

Things to note:

both drives need to be unmounted, so you need a live OS or another machine.
The new drive will have the same exact partitions, which means the same size, so you need to expand them after the copy.
PS: this was for a drive with ext4 partitions, but in theory dd works with the bytes so it shouldn't be an issue what fs you use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

This is my favorite strat. Back in 2022, I used this to move my install from a cheap 256GB SSD I had got to try Linux to my main 1 TB NVMe (which I had recently wiped of Windows). This install is still up and running today, granted it was ext4, but really, a dd clone shouldn't prove a problem for any filesystem.