Typically SSDs cost more per GB, and have less capacity - 1TB drives are appearing, but they are expensive. I decided to swap out my 500GB HDD for a 480GB SSD.
It's quite straight-forward, and I adopted an approach of not updating any partition sizes on the old HDD, so I always had a working fall-back.
I split my drive into three areas, one for /boot, another for the root directory (/) and the final one for /home, where all user data resides. You might just have a single partition, making the whole process simpler.
Partition New Drive
First, attach the new drive to your existing computer, and use something like GPartEd to create a Partition Table, and add some partitions to the drive. It makes sense to keep this roughly in line with your old HDD, so in my case, I created an msdos Partition Table, and built 4 partitions:
- sda1 (/boot) for the boot partition of 500MB (ample for Ubuntu)
- sda5 as a swap partition (same size as your RAM)
- sda6 (/) for the root directory of 26GB (again, ample for Ubuntu)
- sda7 (/home) ... whatever is left
The crucial point, is to make sure the boot and root partitions (sda1 and sda6 in my case) are at least as large as their existing counterparts on your HDD. You're going to clone the old partitions into them, and you can't clone into a smaller partition (obviously).
Copy Basic Partitions
Re-boot from a LiveCD (most have GPartEd on them) and with both old/new drives unmounted, copy across the partitions, using Copy/Paste in GPartEd. This will build the contents of sda1 and sda6 in my case.
You now have a working drive.
Copy User Data
My old /home folder was about 435GB; the new one 410GB, so I just used rsync to copy across the used data areas:
rsync -av old/mount/point new/mount/point/ (watch trailing slashes!)
This obviously takes some time. Go to bed and let it whirl away.
You have now copied all data to the new drive.
Update fstab
The drive mount information held in /etc/fstab uses UUIDs (typically) or labels to identify the drives to mount at boot time, and where to mount them. It's likely that (at least) the (smaller) /home partition will have a different UUID, so use 'sudo blkid' to obtain a list of all the UUIDs and ensure that /etc/fstab (on the new SSD ... you'll need to mount the new drive, navigate to its /etc/fstab - for me on sda6 - and update the file there).
Switch to new Drive and boot
Remove the old HDD and replace with the SSD. Boot up.
(Repair Grub)
This might well fail. I was stuck on the prompt as copying the boot partition won't update Grub for your new SSD, however much you might hope it does.
From the grub prompt, check you have the drive partitions accessible by entering 'ls'. There should be your drive, and its partitions shown (as 'hd0,1', etc.)
You need to first set the root, based on where your /boot partition is. For me, it's sda1:
grub> set root=(hd0,1)
Then point to a Ubuntu image ...
grub> linux /vmlinuz[-xxxxxx] root=/dev/sda6
(after "/vmlinuz" press TAB to see the image options you have, and choose the newest one which will fill in the [-xxxxxxx] part)
For 'root=' point to the root partition (not the boot partition) - sda6 for me.
Do similar TAB completion on the initrd setting:
grub> initrd /initrd[-xxxxxxx]
picking the initrd.img to match the version from above.
Then boot:
grub> boot
All being well, you should now boot to Ubuntu.
Make fix permanent
To re-build the Grub menu options, from command prompt, in a working, booted system:
sudo update-grub
(this will build the Grub menu options as normal).
sudo grub install /dev/sda
(place the generated options into the /boot partition)
Hopefully, you're now done.
