Getting new hardware - can I just move the disk?

[Bo Berglund]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2021 21:44:31 +0200, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:

>Now at 70%...
>

And now done!
So I have freed up space on the target drive to hold the *data* in the source
partition, which spans 464GiB, almost the whole disk, but uses only 165.9 GiB of
data.

Do I need to shrink the source partition before copying or is GParted clever
enough to handle the size difference when pasting into the target's free space?

I have never copied partitions before, so I am a bit lost here.

Two ways:

1) Shrink the source partition to below 241.15 GiB (the free space on the target
drive), then copy-paste.

2) Copy-paste without shrink but let GParted figure out what size is needed on
the new partition to hold the data.

I have tried the second:
- Select the source drive
- Select the source partition
- Click Copy button
- Select the target drive
- Select the empty space
- Click Paste

But the paste option seems not to be enabled here, this indicates that I need to
shrink the source partition too, which is really to be avoided since I do not
want to modify the source disk until I have a good backup...

But maybe it is the only way?

The source has 3 partitions:
Partition   system  Size        Used        Unused      flags
/dev/sda1   ext4    464.01 GiB  165.90 GiB  298.11 GiB  boot
/dev/sda2   extend    1.75 GiB       --       --
/dev/sda5   swap      1.75 GiB   43.54 MiB    1.71 GiB
unallocated           1.02 MiB

The destination only one:
/dev/sdb1   ext4    224.61 GiB  221.13 GiB    3.84 GiB  boot
unallocated         241.15 GiB

What say you?

Do I need to shrink the source?

And what number do I enter, the size is shown in GiB but the size entry box when
shrinking is in a smaller unit and the number I entered while shrinking the
destination is not what later showed up...



-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden