[Discuss] Moving Your Everyday System to New Hardware

[jbk]

A broken hinge on my everyday laptop necessitated a quick 
turnover to a new one. I have done new installs in the 
recent past to laptops with nvme drives and then spending a 
month following up doing the tweaks that make it suitable to 
me but not my usual route.

It used to be that when I wanted to upgrade to better 
hardware for my everyday linux system I could do so by 
either moving the hdd / sdd to the new machine in my case a 
laptop, or putting the hdd/sdd from the new machine in a 
caddy and using rsync with appropriate options to copy the 
current system over usb to the new disk. This has worked 
well for me for the last 15 years or so. Then laptops 
started shipping with nvme drives and that made the old 
approach impractical.

With nvme drives I had to devise a new strategy and I got to 
test it out this past week with all around success. What I 
did was create two root partitions (ext4) and associated 
separate esp partitions so that I could install a bridging 
OS on one that then could be used to mount the destination 
root partition.
You have to enable root logins on the bridging OS for which 
I created an override file in /etc/sshd.d/ that could be 
deleted once I finished the transfer. Prior to the transfer 
I had to create copies of fstab and boot loader entries to 
edit the UUID's to match the destination partitions UUID's 
that I could then overwrite the original files once the 
transfer was complete. Then once configured with ssh and an 
IP address I could use rsync to copy my current OS to the 
new root partition. The same was done for data and home 
partitions.

It took a little over 5 hours to do the task, a couple hours 
for the preparation including using a gparted boot disk to 
prepare the destination drives and formatting, an hour to 
install the bridging OS and configure, an hour and a half to 
do the data transfer and an hour to do the destination 
configurations after transfer.  Over the next two days I 
spent an hour here and there cleaning up mailer issues and 
impacts to other machines on the local lan.

The new laptop has been up now for four days and I've only 
needed to make minor tweaks, it is as if I was on the old 
machine only quicker.

The OS is Fedora39 so the reference to boot loader entries 
is only relevant to RH based distros or those that use 
systemd boot.

till next,

-- 
Jim KR