two bootable OSes on one SSD?
Hello all, I hope everyone is safe and secure these days. This weekend promises to be eventful one way or another so I'm holding on to the seat with both hands! I have an Asus laptop with a 256GiB SSD. I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on it and all is fine except for my own screw-ups, mostly. After I installed the OS I copied over from the 1TB drive I had been using. I only copied what I needed or used frequently, leaving the remaining data on the 1TB drive. Now I'm wondering if there is a way to partition the 1 TB drive so I have its existing bootable Ubuntu and cloning my currently used, the 20.04 OS at about 200GiB full, onto the 1TB drive in a new, bootable partition. Then I would choose which to boot if I want to use them for separate work. Also could I access the data from one partition to the other in use? I currently can either boot the 1TB disc from a USB connection or just mount it as a storage device and get the info I want from it. At the same time I could grow the 256GiB partition to 512GiB and have all the storage I need. Just a thought but intriguing and especially as I watch my remaining disc capacity on the 256GiB drive slowly shrink. Many thanks folks and I wish all the best for this year and this weekend! Brian --
On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 03:18:33PM -0700, Brian O'Keefe wrote:
Hello all,
I hope everyone is safe and secure these days. This weekend promises to be eventful one way or another so I'm holding on to the seat with both hands!
I have an Asus laptop with a 256GiB SSD. I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on it and all is fine except for my own screw-ups, mostly. After I installed the OS I copied over from the 1TB drive I had been using. I only copied what I needed or used frequently, leaving the remaining data on the 1TB drive. Now I'm wondering if there is a way to partition the 1 TB drive so I have its existing bootable Ubuntu and cloning my currently used, the 20.04 OS at about 200GiB full, onto the 1TB drive in a new, bootable partition. Then I would choose which to boot if I want to use them for separate work. Also could I access the data from one partition to the other in use? I currently can either boot the 1TB disc from a USB connection or just mount it as a storage device and get the info I want from it. At the same time I could grow the 256GiB partition to 512GiB and have all the storage I need.
Just a thought but intriguing and especially as I watch my remaining disc capacity on the 256GiB drive slowly shrink.
Many thanks folks and I wish all the best for this year and this weekend!
Brian
Brian I think you're just describing a standard dual boot scenario. You're only complications will come from the two installs already existing, and the troubles you might get into trying to move them around. (e.g. imagine you confuse the destination partition when copying and overwrite one that doesn't have a good backup.) But yeah it's totally doable. Plug in the TB drive "as a storage device" unmount it and run something like gparted to resize it's partitions until you've got your 512G of free space, then create the partitions for the future copy of the 256G in that free space. Then boot from it and image the 256G drive into the new partitions. (Lots of options here, I'd say make the new filesystems by hand or using gparted in the previous step, then use tar or your tool to copy the data from (each partition of) of the 256. All that's left then is to munge the grub config to know about the new second install. And yeah no reason you can't mount all the partitions in both installs to get access to all the files regarless of booted OS. Lots of places for something to go wrong, so I wouldn't start unless you have backups you're comfortable with. But nothing too tricky either. -- sam
Seems we made it folks! Hoping for the best now. Anyway, I never thanked you Sam for your detailed explanation. I should get onto this but I have covid-19 procrastination disorder! Lots of time but not so motivated. Regardless this would be a good thing so I'll try and focus and get it done. Another question though. If I do this will I be able to mount another partition, the data on the 1 TB disc, after I've shrunk that 1 TB to 500GB or so? It would be nicely convenient to be able to access it like a remote drive, for instance, which is how I jerry rigged my setup. The 1TB drive is remote and I can access what I want. Though the real goal is to gain more space than the 256GB drive in the laptop. I could go through the files and archive some onto the 1 TB drive. That's obviously quite simple. Maybe I'm just musing. Did folks hear that Linux distros are going to stop supporting Chromium? Fedora and others are recommending Firefox or Chrome. Firefox doesn't do screen casting whereas Chromium does. Minor issue for the most part but I'm loathe to try and get everything Chromium has, bookmarks, etc. exported to FF. Hope that all are doing OK vis-a-vis the bug. Seems it has a mind of its own (which is weird since viruses are technically not even alive. So what's in it for them?) Cheers Brian On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 04:22:56PM -0700, Sam Noble wrote:
use tar or your tool to copy the data from (each partition of) of the 256. s/your tool/your favorite tool/
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participants (2)
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Brian O'Keefe -
Sam Noble