My old system disk has 4 TB space, while the new SATA SSD disk only has 2 TB. Therefore, with Clonezilla, I cannot perform a whole disk migration, but only partition based migration.

Procedures for the migration are listed below.

  1. Check the partition table on the old disk using sudo gdisk -l.

    Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
1            2048        31250431   14.9 GiB    8200  Linux swap
2        31250432      2177685503   1023.5 GiB  8303  Linux x86 root (/)
3              34            2047   1007.0 KiB  EF02  BIOS boot partition
4      2178734080      7814037134   2.6 TiB     8309  home
5      2177685504      2178734079   512.0 MiB   EF00  EFI-system

  2. Partition the new disk. The swap partition, BIOS boot partition and EFI-system partition have the same sizes as before. The root partition is reduced to 500 GB. The remaining space on the 2 TB disk belongs to the home partition.

  3. Format the swap partition using mkswap, the EFI partition using mkfs.fat -F.

  4. Reboot to Debian live USB.

  5. Resize root partition of the old disk to 500GB.

  6. Reboot to Clonezilla and copy the root partition from the old disk to the new disk.

  7. Shutdown the system. Unplug the old disk and connect the new disk to SATA 3.0 port.

  8. Reboot to Debian live USB and do not boot into the old system. N.B. This is very important for a correct installation of grub and EFI.

  9. Mount the new root partition on the new disk to /mnt. Mount the EFI partition to /mnt/boot/efi. Bind system directories:

    sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys

    Change the root directory of the shell to the mounted root partition /mnt: sudo chroot /mnt. Because of the previous binding system directory, the live system’s directories /dev, /prodc and /sys are available in the chroot environment. Then GRUB can see the disks and update-grub can detect file systems and UUIDs.

  10. Install grub and EFI to the new disk.

    sudo grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sdb
sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB update-grub

    Run sudo update-grub.

  11. Modify the UUID for the root partition in /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab. It should now be the UUID of the partition on the new disk.

  12. Reboot to the system on the new disk.

  13. Make LUKS and ext4 file system for the home partition on the new disk.

    sudo cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdb5
sudo cryptsetup open /dev/sdb5 newhome
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/newhome

  14. Mount the home partition on the old disk and copy data to the new disk.

  15. Modify the UUID of the swap partition not only in /etc/fstab, but also in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume. Then update Initramfs: sudo update-initramfs -u, then reboot.