How to clone a HDD to SSD using a live Linux CD

While there are many commercial products for cloning a hard disk including shrinking the OS partition, this video shows how to do that using a freely available Live Linux OS, which can be booted from CD or a USB stick. Although I use System Rescue CD in this video, this process works with many Live Linux distributions, including Trinity Rescue Kit and Parted Magic.

As the partitions to copy must be resized or moved so they copy to within the SSD with a 1:1 clone, I also show how to keep the recovery partition (or other partition) on the original HDD that is outside the SSD's outer boundary. Normally this would result in an unbootable SSD with a 1:1 clone due to the copied partition table having an entry pointing outside the drive's outer boundary. Note: I haven't tried this with a GUID GPT disk, I'd expect it to be a similar process, but involving gdisk instead of fdisk.

This video contains all the sequences throughout the clone process, including the first boot after the SSD is installed, the 'Found new hardware' process and what the performance is like straight away. The only sequences that were shortened were the clone stage (took about an hour), a few mouse & keyboard operations in Linux and the chkdsk operation that Gparted triggers on the first boot.

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