I'm moving from a 1tb HDD to a 500gb SSD. On the HDD I have a 600gb partition for Windows and a 400gb partition for Ubuntu. On the SSD I have a 150gb partition for Windows, and a 350gb partition for Ubuntu.

Everything on the HDD will fit on the SSD, and I want to get all the files and everything on the new Ubuntu partition to be exact duplicates of the old ones. Theoretically I could copy everything over, remove the HDD, figure out how to make sure GRUB doesn't freak out, and then everything will work fine.

Unfortunately, copying the partition with GParted resulted in GRUB not booting into it properly, presumably because the drive referred to itself as something else. Is there a program I can use that will do this for me?

If not, could someone walk me through the process in simple nooblish?


Try looking at CloneZilla. There is a guide to do just this Here. It runs on a live cd (Or DVD, flash drive, etc.) which is to your advantage because you don't need to be using your hard drive which is what you're cloning.

Or if you just want to fix GRUB:

  1. Boot up the computer off of the 1 TB drive into ubuntu
  2. Log in
  3. Open a terminal
  4. run sudo update-grub
  5. reboot select the entry for the SSD's copy of ubuntu in grub
  6. Boot the SSD's copy of ubuntu
  7. log in
  8. Open a terminal
  9. type sudo update-grub (Déjà vu, right? This is not a typo)
  10. Done!
  11. OPTIONAL! Remove the other copies:
    1. Repeat step 4 without the SSD plugged in
    2. Repeat step 9 without the HDD plugged in)