Tutorial: cloning your Linux Lite drive using the 'dd' command.

[justme2]

Yes, that's sounds feasible. To be on the safe side you could make your partition on the HDD a bit smaller than your destination drive: maybe 30 or 31GB. It may well work with 32GB - perhaps I'm just being over-cautious ...

Have a good Easter Sunday  & don't eat too many chocolate eggs  8)

Thank you again, I feel confident to try it now.

Chocolate is generally banned in our household but I have 'sneaked in' some 70% coco choc which supposedly has some health benefits!  ;D

[m654321]

Thank You for the tutorial 8) , bookmarked.

A pleasure to share 

[justme2]

OK now I 'dd' cloned my LL3.8 system from SDHC to a new partition on the HDD to give dual boot with win**ws, (which I have to retain for my wife). Although I could see LL folders and files on the 2nd partition, no way could I choose to boot LL3.8
After lots of googling I found 'Boot-Repair' and installed it to a SD card, booted from it and allowed it to have its own way! Eventually it reported its findings which looked ok. Rebooting from the HDD then gave me a grub menu and I was able to boot to either system (win or LL3.8).

So the moral of the tale is that maybe your Tutorial could have a reference to 'Boot-Repair' for 'dders' who are confronted with a no-boot situation.

Thanks Mike for your assistance. 

[m654321]

maybe your Tutorial could have a reference to 'Boot-Repair' for 'dders' who are confronted with a no-boot situation.

Glad you got everything working 

I didn't have a no-boot situation, nor did I foresee one, which is the reason 'boot-repair' was not included. I just simply wanted to share what has routinely worked for me. On the repair note, I discovered recently that gparted GUI has a repair disk function which turned out to be really useful & easy to use.

[justme2]

After some thought, I decided to limit the LL3.8 HDD partition to 32GB and keep a seperate partition for 'big' data like video and music files, the reason being that it only takes around 50 minutes (on my i5 PC) to clone the full system including all the extra apps I installed. My total system size is only 26GB. So 'dd' will now be my default system backup method henceforth.

A further problem raised its head - long boot time due to sitting on the yellow feather boot screen for 1m 30s. That was due to not finding the swap partition during booting. For some unknown reason the UUID for the swap partition was not being accepted, even though I double checked it was correct, so I edited fstab to replace the UUID with the correct device id, sda5 and boot time was much reduced.

I think I can now say I have a 'perfect' system for my needs.
Power to Linux Lite (Thanks Jerry and team).

Thanks Mike, 

[m654321]

UPDATE 1: status=progress added to 'dd' command line in tutorial in post #1.

You might also want to add the following to your command:

Code:

status=progress

Many thanks to torreydale for this suggestion 8)
It has now been added to the tutorial.  I just needed to test it before posting, and can confirm it works perfectly giving you have an ongoing idea of how cloning is going.