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Folks, I am looking for the easiest way to transfer my OS, without reinstalling everything from one machine to another. Ubuntu is running on a Asus PC with a 500G hard drive and I want it to run on a Intel Nuc with a 60G SSD.

I have an external usb drive for my data. 

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           386M   40M  346M  11% /run
/dev/sda2       454G  6.9G  425G   2% /
tmpfs           1.9G   20K  1.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb1       7.3T  3.1T  3.9T  45% /media/data
/dev/sda1       511M  3.4M  508M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs           386M     0  386M   0% /run/user/1000

I am a newbie at this, so the easiest the better. I have accessed to the hardwares and it is not critical to have my server running all the time...

Thanks for your help.

Tomáš Pospíšek
  • 494
Edwin
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1 Answers1

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If you don't want to use a tool like clonezilla, then what you can do is:

  • take a live or rescue disk or USB stick
  • boot from that
  • partition the disk of your new computer (maybe take a hint from the partition setup on your old computer)
  • either attach your old disk to your new computer or vice versa or connect both computers on a network
  • then copy the contents of the filesystems on the old computer to the new one - see here: https://superuser.com/questions/307541/copy-entire-file-system-hierarchy-from-one-drive-to-another
  • once the content is copied make the system bootable
  • make sure /etc/fstab is correct (i.e. either contains the correct blockdevice UUIDs or contains /dev/sdaX style block device identifiers)
Community
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Tomáš Pospíšek
  • 494
  • Ok, I finally got to the point I need to make the system bootable. How do I do that??? – Edwin Dec 01 '17 at 11:23
  • have a look at this: https://www.howtogeek.com/114884/how-to-repair-grub2-when-ubuntu-wont-boot/ – Tomáš Pospíšek Dec 01 '17 at 20:17
  • I manage to "repair the grub2" but with errors. First, in Gparted, it says “physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512". Do I have to ignore this? And then, the sda1 filesystem is BOOT BIOS when my original machine has EFI. Does this matter? – Edwin Dec 11 '17 at 11:42
  • Did you google or search "ask Ubuntu" for “physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512"? In short: if you still have your original data on your old computer and you do not have data you want to keep on your new computer, then redo the disk partitioning so that physical block size and what linux thinks match. See this:https://askubuntu.com/questions/781223/physical-block-size-is-2048-bytes-but-linux-says-it-is-512-when-formatting-us. Warning: repartitioning will render all data inaccessible! – Tomáš Pospíšek Dec 11 '17 at 18:39