HD to SSD question.

[Mihai T. Lazarescu]

On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 10:57:09PM +0200, Erik P. Olsen wrote:

> I plan to swap the HD on my laptop with an SSD of same size.
> Will it work OK if I dd the HD to an external HD, swap
> the HD with the SSD and dd the contents back to the SSD?
> I believe I can use knoppix to the process.

You can dd /dev/sdXX of the HDD into a file, then dd that file
into the SSD.  It should generally work.  If you have a spare
laptop that can host either the original HDD or the new SSD
for the duration of the operation, you can boot both from a
live distro and dd directly from one to the other via network.
It may help to zero the unused space and the swap partition(s)
on source HDD and compress the transfer over net.

But _do_ check carefully that the SSD has at least the same
number of _bytes/sectors_ and sector size as the HDD, else
you risk to end up with corrupted partitions.  E.g., my 256GB
SSD says:

    fdisk -l /dev/sda

    Disk /dev/sda: 256.1 GB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
    Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Should the SSD be slightly shorter you can boot from a live
distro and shrink a bit the last partition on the source HDD
to keep it within the destination SSD boundary.

You may also want to check Clonezilla, which automates some
operations: http://clonezilla.org/

Good luck!
Mihai