Clonezilla.

[Vacuum]

Anyone tried it?  What I want to do is to clone a partition on my ssd to an external hdd. Then i'd like to plug this hdd to another laptop. Question is, will this work?

[doctormann]

Should work but CloneZilla is not very user-friendly.

You need to make a bootable live verson - either USB or CD/DVD.

I recommend that you Google for a tutorial on how to use it.

[Vacuum]

31 minutes ago, doctormann said:

Should work but CloneZilla is not very user-friendly.

You need to make a bootable live verson - either USB or CD/DVD.

I recommend that you Google for a tutorial on how to use it.

I have the tutorials, and it seems quite straightforward, but no mention on moving the 'cloned version' to another computer.

[doctormann]

4 minutes ago, Vacuum said:

I have the tutorials, and it seems quite straightforward, but no mention on moving the 'cloned version' to another computer.

Can't really help you there - just have to try it.

Do an image back up first, just in case.

 

There's a video on Youtube - one of Carey Holzman's vlogs - about this.  he was trying to do something similar but got into trouble because Acronis - not Clonezilla - changed his boot from MBR to UEFI and left him with an unbootable OS.  I seem to remember that the problem was that the old laptop that he was transplanting his SSD drive into didn't support UEFI.

 

I don't have the link - you could search for it but the video is very long so probably not worthwhile.  Just be careful what you are doing.

[oldcpu]

I've only done such with identical hard drives to the same computer.   Once one adds a different computer (and different type of drives) into the mix, there is IMHO the potential for things to go afoul. Likely work arounds/fixes are available, but the ease or difficulty of doing such may depend on your GNU/Linux knowledge (assuming that is what you are cloning).  Different hardware could mean problems if MBR or EFI, or if different graphics devices on two different PCs.  If using secure boot w/EFI you could have issues when transfering (I think < not sure> ) .  Assuming both PCs use MBR for boot, but have different graphics devices, you may find booting to run level 3 (text screen) dependent on whether using proprietary or free open source graphic drivers.   Also different monitors may cause an issue, dependent on what your previous setup was.  

[oldcpu]

Further to the above, dependent on your linux distribution and your PC age, prior to cloning it may be a good idea to check the /etc/fstab file and (if grub1 and not grub2) the /boot/grub/menu.lst of the old hard drive, to see if it uses disk-by-id identification in the /etc/fstab, the /boot/grub/menu.lst, and the /boot/grub/device.map files.   I believe one does not want disk-by-id identification if cloning.   I don't think clonezilla looks after this (albeit its been years since I used it, so I can not recall).

 

Of course its always good to have a backup prior to conducting any such operation.