0

I have an HDD and an SSD on my laptop. My HDD has a very high value of reallocated sector count (~10k) and it's likely i'm going to have to replace it soon. I had dual-booted Windows and Ubuntu and I do not want to reinstall them all over again.

My boot partitions are entirely located in the SSD. Only Ubuntu /home and Windows drives (all except C:/) are placed in the hdd. I am planning to do the following:

  1. "unallocate" the hdd partitions from both Windows and Ubuntu (i.e., make them visible as "free space")
  2. Create a makeshift /home in the ssd, so that ubuntu still boots (is that even necessary though?)
  3. Get the hdd replaced
  4. Reallocate all the free space to both Ubuntu and Windows as required

Will this approach work? Or is there a simpler approach?

System information:

  • Ubuntu 20.04 (Linux gt 5.4.0-42-generic #46-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 10 00:24:02 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux)
  • Windows 10 (will install all pending updates when I boot into it)
  • 1TB hdd mounted on /dev/sda TOSHIBA MQ04ABF100 (JU001C)
  • 120GB ssd mounted on /dev/sdb WDC WDS120G2G0B-00EPW0 (UI450000)
Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Your plan sounds good, except where I would copy the existing home to a /home folder on the SSD. You may limit this to just the user configuration data, and the user folders "Documents", "Music" etc. without any files in them if space is an issue. Removing the entry in /etc/fstab for your separate home would then automatically bring you on the copy. The system will boot, and you can then allocate the other data how you see fit.

A way how to go from a separate home partition to a home partition on the root partition is outlined in detail here: Move separate /home partition to the default configuration /home folder.

When you have the new drive

Once you have a new drive, you could reverse the proces, i.e., create a separate home partition again. However, if space on your SSD permits, you could also opt to leave the user configuration data on the SSD and symlink the user folders containing the user's files to the new drive. The latter is much easier to do, and boils down to the same experience for the user.

Improve this answer
1
  • Thanks, I ended up migrating my stuff away from the original SSD as space on the original was limited (<120gb) and shared between windows and ubuntu. I used this guide to do the migration but now that I think the same answer which you linked to could have been used.
    – Gaurang Tandon
    Jul 29, 2020 at 9:38

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .