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Option 1: Cloning HDD to smaller SSD

Hi guys. I've been investigating how to dual boot from a new SSD. I'm planning to have the Windows OEM OS and Ubuntu on my SSD while using my HDD as storage. However, I'm not sure what partitions should be moved to the SSD since Windows has created a lot of them after I updated Windows from 8 to 10 a long time ago, and I also created a partition to dual boot Ubuntu on the HDD.

These are my current partitions on the hard drive: https://i.stack.imgur.com/7bWd0.jpg

  • HDD: 1TB (Use as storage for Windows and Ubuntu
  • SSD 240 GB (I want ~70GB for everything related to Ubuntu)

Another option would be to have both OS's inside the SSD, but also use the SSD as storage for Ubuntu and use the HDD for Windows storage only, but I'm not sure if this is recommended as it might be more complicated I believe.

So, what is the best method to accomplish this? What partitions should be moved to the SSD?

Option 2: Clean install

Is it just better that I do a clean install of Windows in the SSD? If so, do I still need some of the partitions that are in the HDD like Sony's or WindowsRE?

Im' not sure which is the best path and hope you guys can guide me :)

1 Answer 1

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You might have the best luck if you get Windows itself to do the hard stuff. I'd suggest:

  1. Backup EVERYTHING
  2. Use Windows' "Disk Management" (Windows-X, K) to shrink your windows partition, and to move the other windows partitions down. Check that it still boots. I don't know if you can omit any of the partitions that Windows built automatically. You can probably keep any D: drive on the HDD.
  3. Use an Ubuntu live disk to move the Linux partitions down until everything has the size and location that will fit on your SSD. Check that it still boots. If not, use the live disk to re-install and/or recover grub.
  4. Copy the stuff to the SSD that you want there. It looks like your disk has a GPT partition table, so that may need a bit of repair to get a proper backup partition table.

At step 4, you could avoid some worries by using sfdisk from Linux to dump a text file describing your partitions to a text file, edit it, and use sfdisk again to partition the SSD to match just the partitions you're going to move. See the BACKING UP THE PARTITION TABLE section of the sfdisk man page. Since you're going to edit the description, you should use the --dump option to get a readable text version.

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