New HDD

[Nils Kassube]

pete smout wrote:
> I have brought a new HDD for my laptop, and I want to install 13.10
> (saucy) onto it, the problem starts that my DVD burner is on the
> fritz, and I cannot get my lappy to boot from USB stick!
> 
> So I was wondering if there is a way of installing it to the new drive
> via USB (I own a USB HDD caddy), Unetbootin does not recognize the
> HDD caddy and startup disk creator does not create a bootable HDD!

If the laptop doesn't boot from a USB stick it will probably also not 
boot from a USB disk. But if you want to install the 13.10 system via 
USB and then replace the disk in the laptop with the new one, it should 
work. Install Virtualbox with the USB extension from the virtualbox site 
<https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads>. Make a virtual machine 
without virtual disk. Then use the 13.10 ISO file as a virtual DVD and 
the USB disk as the only disk. Install as usual and then put the new 
disk in your laptop.

> Failing this is there a way of 'cloneing' my current HDD onto the new
> one so I can then upgrade from 13.04 to 13.10?

You could use gparted to clone your partition(s) to the USB disk. I'm 
not sure if that is possible if you can't start from a LiveCD/DVD 
though, probably gparted can only clone unmounted partitions. But if it 
works, don't restart the system with both disks connected because the 
UUIDs of the partitions are cloned as well. I suppose the system might 
not bahave as expected if the UUID for the root partition exists twice.


Nils