I replaced a RAID-1 with (2) 300 Gb 15k spinners with (2) Samsung 850 Pro 256 Gb SSD's for performance.
I figured out a way to copy the array to the smaller disks. I used the latest version of CloneZilla - 2.3.2-22.
First, I made the total size of all partitions less than the target disk. It won't work otherwise.
There were (3) partitions on the disk, a tiny Dell OEM partition, a 2 Gb Windows recovery partition, and the remainder as the C: drive. I was able to shrink the partition for the C: drive by 60 Gb. (I wish I would've known about gparted before I started!) Hey, I'm a poet and didn't know it! :^)
Because I had spare hard drive cage slots in the server, I stuck the (2) SSD's in the cage and made a new RAID-1 array next to the original.
After many permutations, I finally figured out an Expert combination.
Do a device-to-device clone.
Select expert mode.
Unselect -r (do NOT resize the partitions)
Select -icds (do NOT check the destination disk size)
that's it!
The copy (after I took all day figuring it out) took less than 10 minutes, since the 215 Gb C: partition only had about 30 Gb of data. I shut down the machine, pulled the original spinners, pointed the boot drive to the new SSD array, and done!
Direct disk-to-disk clone, to a SMALLER drive, and NO manual partitioning!
Rob
Last edit: Rob Pettrey 2015-03-09
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Before you make a shrink of partitions make an optimisation of these ones.
(gparted only is showing the sum (!) of used blocks not the very last blocks in a partition )
I replaced a RAID-1 with (2) 300 Gb 15k spinners with (2) Samsung 850 Pro 256 Gb SSD's for performance.
I figured out a way to copy the array to the smaller disks. I used the latest version of CloneZilla - 2.3.2-22.
First, I made the total size of all partitions less than the target disk. It won't work otherwise.
There were (3) partitions on the disk, a tiny Dell OEM partition, a 2 Gb Windows recovery partition, and the remainder as the C: drive. I was able to shrink the partition for the C: drive by 60 Gb. (I wish I would've known about gparted before I started!) Hey, I'm a poet and didn't know it! :^)
Because I had spare hard drive cage slots in the server, I stuck the (2) SSD's in the cage and made a new RAID-1 array next to the original.
After many permutations, I finally figured out an Expert combination.
Do a device-to-device clone.
Select expert mode.
Unselect -r (do NOT resize the partitions)
Select -icds (do NOT check the destination disk size)
that's it!
The copy (after I took all day figuring it out) took less than 10 minutes, since the 215 Gb C: partition only had about 30 Gb of data. I shut down the machine, pulled the original spinners, pointed the boot drive to the new SSD array, and done!
Direct disk-to-disk clone, to a SMALLER drive, and NO manual partitioning!
Rob
Last edit: Rob Pettrey 2015-03-09
Before you make a shrink of partitions make an optimisation of these ones.
(gparted only is showing the sum (!) of used blocks not the very last blocks in a partition )
You can look for 'Cloning to a smaller target HDD' in
http://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/discussion/Help/thread/4c11e2d1/
(Cloning OS drive on Dell Studio 1747 laptop)
Last edit: Fuchs 2015-03-19
@Rob,
Cool! Thanks for your sharing.
Steven.