Clonezilla should do the job quite nicely. :)

i have used dd to make exact copy of it, even the UUID gets copied then. - this i did from liveusb cause its not really ideal from running system.

but i have also used rsync on my running system to clone to new drive.

i think the rsync command i used was rsync -ahPHAXx

not 100% sure, might need to check the man page of rsync

The really lazy way..... (works best for identical drives)

cat /dev/sda > /dev/sdb

And then once done, you can tidy up sdb using gparted and your usual formatting tools.

I quite often use this technique to write usb images and isos to usb

cat /tmp/myiso.iso > /dev/sdb # where sdb is the usb stick

I'd probably advise the other methods more than this (e.g. dd or use a bootable clonezilla cd/dvd/flash drive).

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoI have Ubuntu 14.04.5 installed on a 120GB SSD drive in this partition scheme:
A 512mb partition mounted at /boot
A 19GB partition mounted at /
And a 92GB partition mounted at /home


I want to clone the three partitions above to another SSD of the same capacity and, after that, I want to remove the old SSD with Ubuntu 14 from the machine and boot from the new drive with ubuntu...

I want to do this because I want to upgrade the system without any risk..
If something goes wrong with the upgrade, I have the original Ubuntu 14 system untouched on its original SSD.

I tried booting from a live xubuntu and using Gparted for to clone the partitions...
The partitions where cloned successfully, but the system won't boot from the new drive.

If you cloned using gparted, I'm guessing your new drive has different UUID's. Not sure as I've never done it that way. If that is the problem you need to boot an live CD/USB and edit your fstab and grub.cfg, replacing the old UUID's with the new ones. I usually use cp or ssh/tar to copy my install (with permissions) to a new drive and then make the needed fstab grub.cfg modifications. On systems with SELINUX you'll likely need to drop a .autorelabel in root.

If you want to clone it exactly you can use dd or clonezilla.

Quoting: g000hcat /tmp/myiso.iso > /dev/sdb # where sdb is the usb stick

I have heard that never tried it but I often simply do
cp /tmp/myiso.iso /dev/sdb # where sdb is the usb stick
and it works :)

as far as I know more advisable tools are:
dd
ddrescue
rsync

I personally do not make any system backup never. It is the data we should want to backup. The system should be irrelevant.

I'm happy to report that...IT IS DONE!!!! ^_^

After A LOT of research, experiments, errors and a literal headache I found the solution:

connect both, the source SSD and the Destination SSD..
Boot from a live distro of the same branch and version than the original system, in my case Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS..
Once I booted from the live Ubuntu 14.04.5, with the help of Gparted I copied/paste all the partitions of the source ssd on the destination SSD...

After that, I turned off the machine.. I Unplugged the source SSD from its sata port and connected the new SSD in that port (sata 0) and then I booted again from the live Ubuntu 14.04.5..

After booting from the live distro, I opened a terminal with this sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

I followed the instructions and that's it...

I turned off the PC, removed the USB live distro, turned on again and I was able to boot normally from the new SSD..
In fact, am writing this from it.
Now I can experiment with the system upgrade from 14.04.5 to 16.04.4 without any risk... :)
Let's see If I can make ROTTR work..

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: lucinosI personally do not make any system backup never. It is the data we should want to backup. The system should be irrelevant.

Not when it takes months or years to configure it the way you want.

Says the Gentoo user ;-)
And I totally agree, I haven't changed my system for years.

When I last had to migrate to another hd, I went the rsync route and reinstalled grub.

My vote goes to CloneZilla, I use it for work and personal use. Once at work I had to install 7 identical systems which came without OS, I installed everything on the first and then cloned everything to the others through the network feature, saved me lots of time.