Moving Ubuntu from old HDD to SDD revisited

I am trying to do what was asked - and apparently solved - in a question from about 10 years ago:

How to move ubuntu to an ssd

I want to move an existing, working Ubuntu 20.04 install across to a new SSD and not use the old HDD following the move.

I created a partition on the new SSD using gparted, and booted from a Live DVD as suggested in the top answer in the thread above.

However, when I attempt to mount the new drives (which show up as sda and sdb when I type lsblk at the terminal prompt), the following occurs:

sudo mount /dev/sda

mount: /dev/sda: can't find in /etc/fstab

The same result occurred with

sudo mount /media/sda
mount: /media/sda: can't find in /etc/fstab

and if I try to mount a partition rather than the whole drive:

sudo mount /media/sda1
mount: /dev/sda1: can't find in /etc/fstab.

So, I know it's a numpty question, but what am I doing wrong? In a way I'm not surprised by these error messages, because the Live DVD Ubuntu presumably doesn't know anything about the drives on the machine or their partitions in /etc/fstab, since I haven't told it. But where do I go from here?

I also tried the Nautilus based method described here how to access hard drive files from live cd but Nautilus does not show devices (as reported in one of the comments on that page).

Do I need to edit fstab? Strange that none of the 10-years-ago guys mentioned that, if it is the case.

Many thanks,

Eric Ubuntu 20.04 Dell Precision T1650

Solution 1:

Migrating Linux can be done with clonezilla. Works like a charm.

Now mount require at least two params to achieve what your are trying to do:

mount what where

if you do not tell mount "where", it goes to look at /etc/fstab to find where. So your line could be:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

That will mount the partition at /mnt. One important thing. /dev/sda is the disk. /dev/sda(n) is the partition.