Moving the system to another OS with a small drive?

F

FredJ

Hello all,
My laptop drive is on it's last legs so I wish to move the system to a small hard drive but with everything the same, I am hoping I can do this in a simple way rather than re-installing and setting everything up...
I run zfs on my laptop if that makes it any more difficult.

I would like to use DD for this but the issue is that my hardrive on my laptop is 320gb and this is a 80gb hard drive, Bear in mind that I have only used about 40gb on the laptop drive.

I am curious will a dd work with this or will it copy all the empty bits over as well?

Thanks in advance
Fred.
 
It seems I cannot edit, Appoligies for the double post. The title should read "Moving the system to another hard drive which is smaller"
 
I have one partition and 2 slices. A boot and then everything else from zfs. I find it interesting you say dd will work, As from reading other things i see dd will copy all the attributes of the drive on a bit for bit basis and so it is not suitable for this purpose. I wonder does clonezilla work with zfs..
If I am wrong about dd please tell me as that would be the simplest way to move forward.
 
Forget about 'dd' to clone a disk.

The classical way is to use 'dump' and 'restore'. For that to work you would need to do a minimal install on your new hard disk.
Not having enough memory on my box to run ZFS and thus having nada experience with ZFS I don't know if that would work ;)

Another alternative, also needing a minimal install on the new disk is to use "rsync".

You could create a backup of your current disk on an external USB disk or faster to a desktop system through the LAN.

Take out he original 320 GB disk from your laptop, and replace it with the new 80GB one. Do a minimal install and do the restore.

A smart way could be to do a minimal install with ZFS support on small MBR partition/slice on the new 80gig disk. Boot into this mini system and you have all the UFS and ZFS tools to recreate your system on the remaining disk space.
 
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