Cloning with gparted

[fox]

In a previous thread someone indicated that it is possible to clone a partition with gparted. I use gparted a lot, but I didn't know you could clone a partition with it. I have been rearranging my two main distros between internal and external drives and I tried that cloning operation for the moves. I have to say that it is the easiest way to clone that I have ever tried - copy a partition with a menu command, move to the location where you want the clone, and choose paste from the menu. Easy as pie, and much easier than using Clonezilla or dd unless you want to do something more complex.

[ssfc72]

Thanks for the info, Mike. I may make use of it sometime.

[buster]

I used it last year. Simple as can be, but I could never get a bootable partition to work. So I cloned the /home, and reinstalled Mint onto an ssd without formatting the /home. Seemed to do the trick. Did you clone any / partitions, and did they boot?

If a eufi (?) partition is also created and cloned, maybe it would work.

[fox]

I cloned whole bootable partitions, and the clones worked. The one thing you have to be careful with when cloning is that a cloned partition has the same UUID as the original. So if both are mounted at the same time, you could be trying to boot one of them but it will be the other that boots. In my most recent case, this wasn't an issue, as I cloned two partitions. In one case the original was erased, and in the other, the clone went onto a drive that wasn't mounted at the same time. But when this is not the case, you can fix the problem in two steps:

• Use gparted to change the UUID of one of the partitions (original or clone) using the Change UUID option in the Partition menu
• Edit the /etc/fstab file of the partition whose UUID you just changed. Find the line that lists the UUID of the partition and change the UUID number to whatever you changed the partition to in Step 1. Note that you need administrative privileges to edit the file.

[BusterE]

I solved the problem a different way last year, tho my solution wasn't as simple as you indicate.  Not going back there. No need to add to my workload and add to the time I spend with a screen in front of my eyes. But thanks anyway.