Partition Size, using dd and options afterwords

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

I have a new Western Digital model WDBH2D0010HNC-NRSN hard disk drive. That's a 1 terabyte drive. My current, in use, desktop drive is 400gig.

mark@Lexington:~$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 400.1 GB, 400088457216 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 48641 cylinders, total 781422768 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00084ceb

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048    39063551    19530752   83  Linux
/dev/sda2       765798398   781422591     7812097    5  Extended
/dev/sda3        39063552   765796351   363366400   83  Linux
/dev/sda5       765798400   781422591     7812096   82  Linux swap / Solaris

I want to use the command line command "dd" to transfer ALL of what is on the 400 gig to the 1 terabyte drive.

One - is this the correct use of dd for my purpose? And please note, no sudo argument

dd if=/dev/sda of /dev/sdb

where sda is the 400gig drive with folders, files, objects and sdb is the new, essentially empty, drive.

Two - what formatting is necessary for ext4? Rounded to cylinders should NOT be checked using GParted? Or by using dd I don't have to format to ext4 first?

Three - the transfer must be done in LiveCD (or LiveUSB) session? Or can the /sda be mounted and the /sdb be unmounted?

After the transfer is completed should I resize the / and /home and 'swap'? I'm mostly considering enlarging the / as it is about 20 gig. I am thinking to make it 40 gig. Maybe that's overkill. Opinions?

I have backed up all of /home, that the default Ubuntu backup software, named: Backup, can do. Whenever it does a backup, Backup puts a message on-screen about not backing up a few items. I believe this is harmless, as it cannot backup the directory or file .gvfs and the like. Here is today's message:

/home/mark/.speech-dispatcher/log/ibmtts.log
/home/mark/.speech-dispatcher/pid/speech-dispatcher.pid

Thank you for your time and all ideas considered.

[mansonfan78]

As far as partition sizes are concerned 20 gb is more than enough for / (I only have a 15 gb partition for it), swap should be the same size (or slightly larger) as your ram (more than that would just be wasting space), /home can be as big as you want. I would use Gparted to make the new drives partitions and then just use Clonezilla to copy the drive (just select partition to partition copy and select all the partitions - if you tell it to just copy the whole drive it might resize the partitions to a size you don't want).

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

I had a look at the Clonezilla site as well as the Clonezilla Forum. Oddly, I cannot find documents showing how to make this work for my specific setup. I'm sure it would. I just don't see what to do.

I'm still in the hunt.

[mansonfan78]

It's not complicated, once Clonezilla is running it's pretty self-explanatory. I'd say it's much easier to figure out than command line dd.

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

Can you tell me if Clonezilla creates or re-creates the existing partitions? Do I have to create / and /home and swap or does CZ do it automatically?

[mansonfan78]

If you choose to copy the entire drive it will create the partitions automatically and size them proportionately, meaning if the new drive is twice the size of the old drive than the new partitions will be twice the size of the old ones. If you want them to be different sizes you'll have to resize them with Gparted later.

[sammiev]

Can you tell me if Clonezilla creates or re-creates the existing partitions? Do I have to create / and /home and swap or does CZ do it automatically?

Clonezilla will put it back as it was on the HDD you saved it from. I use Clonezilla often and learn new things every time I use it.

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

Clonezilla has confused me a lot. While it did clone the target and I can boot into it, it made a mess of things. I followed the instructions exactly.

When I was asked if I want to clone the boot sector, I said yes.

When I was asked the question about default install I said yes.

My source drive, 400gig, had 3 partitions:

/ (sda1)

/home (sda5)

swap (swap - only 8 gig anyway)

nothing else.

The new drive, after being mauled by Clonezilla has:

sda1 is /

sda3 is /home

sda2 is extended

sda5 is linux-swap

unallocated

for a better description, please see the attached screenshot.gparted 1T drive.png

I read at, this forum: Clean 13.10 install, cannot upgrade to 14.04

that the problem of:

Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.

can be fixed with software: fixparts, a package not in the USoftwareCent. Nor will apt-get install find it, either.

Can someone please help?

[oldfred]

One thing I do not know about Clonezilla is whether when you clone to a new drive does it create new UUIDs, or do you now have duplicate UUIDs on each drive. Or you need to change old drives UUID to make sure it really boots correct partition.

# To clear cache and get new view:
sudo blkid -c /dev/null -o list

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

One thing I do not know about Clonezilla is whether when you clone to a new drive does it create new UUIDs, or do you now have duplicate UUIDs on each drive. Or you need to change old drives UUID to make sure it really boots correct partition.

# To clear cache and get new view:
sudo blkid -c /dev/null -o list

please pardon me: whattttt????

Results of CL:

mark@Lexington:~$ sudo blkid -c /dev/null -o list
[sudo] password for mark:
device fs_type label mount point UUID
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1 ext4 / 536a864f-d91c-4e3d-b6f6-108a783d5e46
/dev/sda3 ext4 /home 1455a163-528e-42ec-8b29-ca7076fc00c7
/dev/sda5 swap <swap> a37873a0-d70f-495f-92ea-fffb41041cf4

The "booting" isn't the problem. Clonezilla messed up the partitioning. I have an "unallocated" (that's not a partition) of 500 gig, that CZ left unallocated. I'm trying to fix the partitions with the app: fixparts.
What should I do?