Make sure to do a clean shutdown of the liveCD. (It will take the same length of time as before - a couple of hours) Then proceed with the dd: dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda If it does, you can wipe the MBR and partition table from it with the following command: sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=24 To verify that the 160 GB (/dev/sda) has no partition table.

Open a terminal window and check things out: sudo fdisk -l (/dev/sdc is the LiveCD I am booting from) The original /dev/sdb is still plugged into the same motherboard SATA socket as before, so now I plug the SSD into SATA port 0, and the SSD is now /dev/sda The new SSD is also a 160 GB ($50 on eBay) so it is large enough to hold the partitions. It still contains just the original 160 GB partitions from before I have not used more of the 750 GB drive. Say your boot drive fails, or you decide to replace it with a 160 GB SSD drive like I just did. THEN LATER - AND MORE TO THE POINT OF YOUR QUESTION: That causes my system to boot from the first hard drive it finds, which is the 750 on SATA port 2.īut in your case, you are removing the 750 and setting it aside as the backup, thus setting the stage to answer your question specifically. In my case, I then removed the original boot drive and set it aside as the backup. I am writing this 3 years after you posted the question and mine takes 8000 seconds (about 2.5 hours) to do the backup. Proceed to back up your boot drive to the larger one: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb It will appear as if it was a new, blank drive. Which will wipe the MBR and partition tables guaranteed. If /dev/sdb shows partitions but you want to use it anyway, you can wipe the MBR and partition table from it with the following command: sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=24 Then ideally, it will show that /dev/sdb has no partition table. dev/sda is your original 160 GB drive with partitions. dev/sdb (750 GB drive) is plugged into SATA port 2 dev/sda (160GB boot drive) is plugged into SATA port 0 You might be doing this simply for backup. Here is an over-simplified answer, where I either never used gparted to resize the partition, or I did but now have done it again to bring it back down to size.įor instance, if you take a 160 GB drive (/dev/sda) and copy it to a 750 GB drive (/dev/sdb) - which I did to get faster booting on a 7200 rpm drive. (Note that all the below should be done by booting your original installation DVD and using the LiveCD option so the drives in question are not mounted.) Yes, as long as the partitions will fit so do not need to be resized by dd.

Clone hard drive to smaller ssd linux