# Moving the system to another OS with a small drive?



## FredJ (Jan 2, 2010)

Hello all,
My laptop drive is on it's last legs so I wish to move the system to a small hard drive but with everything the same, I am hoping I can do this in a simple way rather than re-installing and setting everything up...
I run zfs on my laptop if that makes it any more difficult.

I would like to use DD for this but the issue is that my hardrive on my laptop is 320gb and this is a 80gb hard drive, Bear in mind that I have only used about 40gb on the laptop drive.

I am curious will a dd work with this or will it copy all the empty bits over as well?

Thanks in advance
Fred.


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## FredJ (Jan 2, 2010)

It seems I cannot edit, Appoligies for the double post. The title should read "Moving the system to another hard drive which is smaller"


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## aragon (Jan 2, 2010)

FredJ said:
			
		

> I am curious will a dd work with this or will it copy all the empty bits over as well?


Yup, it will.

How is your old drive sliced and partitioned?


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## FredJ (Jan 2, 2010)

I have one partition and 2 slices. A boot and then everything else from zfs. I find it interesting you say dd will work, As from reading other things i see dd will copy all the attributes of the drive on a bit for bit basis and so it is not suitable for this purpose. I wonder does clonezilla work with zfs..
If I am wrong about dd please tell me as that would be the simplest way to move forward.


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## J65nko (Jan 2, 2010)

Forget about 'dd' to clone a disk. 

The classical way is to use 'dump' and 'restore'. For that to work you would need to do a minimal install on your new hard disk.
Not having enough memory on my box to run ZFS and thus having nada experience with ZFS I don't know if that would work 

Another alternative, also needing a minimal install on the new disk is to use "rsync". 

You could create a backup of your current disk on an external USB disk or faster to a desktop system through the LAN.

Take out he original 320 GB disk from your laptop, and replace it with the new 80GB one. Do a minimal install and do the restore.

A smart way could be to do a minimal install with ZFS support on small MBR partition/slice on the new 80gig disk. Boot into this mini system and you have all the UFS and ZFS tools to recreate your system on the remaining disk space.


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## dennylin93 (Jan 2, 2010)

If you're using UFS, take a look at dump() and restore(). For ZFS, there's `# zfs send` and `# zfs receive`.


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## aragon (Jan 3, 2010)

FredJ said:
			
		

> I find it interesting you say dd will work


Sorry, I actually meant it won't work...


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