Linux Mint setup on my laptop

[JohnJ]

G'day all. I am a total newbie to Linux. I am very Windows savvy. My current Linux Mint setup is on a Windows 10 Laptop. My laptop has a 120gb ssd onboard plus a 2tb hard disk. I have a partitioned 500gb separate ssd connected via usb. Mint is installed on my 110gb partition. I have loaded and run Mint and I am using Grub to switch between Mint and Windows. All works great. I am very impressed with Linux and Mint and I am slowly getting my head around the different protocols, language and what not.
My master plan now is to (good grief) dump Windows completely on the laptop by getting hold of a ssd that I can Insert into my laptop. So sort of completely as I will have the old windows ssd in my bottom drawer. Not sure why I don't just override the Windows ssd with a fresh install of Mint but having the original Windows ssd in my bottom drawer just make me feel better on my Linux journey.
After all that preamble I think that here are my questions, and options.
1. Should I try to clone my 110gb partition on my 500glb separate connected ssd into whatever new ssd I install into the laptop? Maybe something called Foxclone can do this? If I go down this path, how will Grub handle all this or doesn't it matter because I will only have Mint installed on the laptop?
2. Should I not go down the clone path and just install a fresh version of Mint onto the new ssd?
Cheers
John

 

[Condobloke]

I guess it may depend on how much time you spent configuring the existing Linux Mint.....if it was a significant chunk of time, you may wish to avoid that and go the clone route.

On the other hand, I think at this juncture you will maybe benefit from doing a fresh install? Perhaps configure a few things a bit differently ?
Did I read correctly that Linux and windows occupy that same 120gb ssd ?....So that ssd can reside in the bottom drawer, more as a backups backup?........a JIC (just in case)

Linux is about having some fun and enjoying what you are doing. Stick that ssd with windows in the bottom drawer and give yourself some comfort.

 

[JohnJ]

I currently have Mint installed on my 110gb partition on my Separate 500gb ssd which is connected to the laptop usb. Windows is currently installed on the the 120gb ssd onboard the laptop.
Yes, I did spent quite some configuring Mint on the 500gb ssd but if needed I am ok with doing a completely fresh install on the new ssd that I will install into the laptop. So just to clear up my question 1, is this cloning business reasonably seamless and how would this effect (or not) my Grub settings. Refer back to my Question 1 about this point. Cheers

 

[APTI]

I am a Fedora person but same idea. I would not try cloning or moving, I think you will find more frustration than anything else. I would and recommend to my customers that switch, that you put in a new SSD to install the new OS. This means all your old stuff is still accessible. It means you can easily switch back for any reason you may need. It makes for a far less problematic install. It sounds as though you have an M.2 in the laptop and that should be replaced if that is your OS drive. Install linux on that. Running over a USB is just asking for trouble. Not to mention the speed issue. Go full linux that way and grub not an issue. Or just pick up a refurb laptop and go full linux on it. The dual booting is an issue especially when windoze does updates, often grub is overwritten. It is best to keep linux and windoze separated so they do not fight. On a desktop that is easy with multiple hard drives and a switch system. On a laptop you do not have the luxury so I suggest a refurb laptop or replace SSD/M2 on current. Choice is yours depending on how often you need windoze. I put win 7, win 10 and win 11 on virtual machines in linux for the times I need it.

 

[JohnJ]

I am a Fedora person but same idea. I would not try cloning or moving, I think you will find more frustration than anything else. I would and recommend to my customers that switch, that you put in a new SSD to install the new OS. This means all your old stuff is still accessible. It means you can easily switch back for any reason you may need. It makes for a far less problematic install. It sounds as though you have an M.2 in the laptop and that should be replaced if that is your OS drive. Install linux on that. Running over a USB is just asking for trouble. Not to mention the speed issue. Go full linux that way and grub not an issue. Or just pick up a refurb laptop and go full linux on it. The dual booting is an issue especially when windoze does updates, often grub is overwritten. It is best to keep linux and windoze separated so they do not fight. On a desktop that is easy with multiple hard drives and a switch system. On a laptop you do not have the luxury so I suggest a refurb laptop or replace SSD/M2 on current. Choice is yours depending on how often you need windoze. I put win 7, win 10 and win 11 on virtual machines in linux for the times I need it.

Thanks for your clear explanation APTI. Yes this whole cloning thing does have its place I am sure but for my specific purpose and my particular approach I reckon a new onboard SSD will be the go. Cheers John

 

[wizardfromoz]

Morning John.

Nothwithstanding the contribution from @APTI above, I can provide you an option that what you seek can likely be effected through the use of Timeshift.

I have an urgent staff matter to attend to first, but once that is done, I will come back here and outline it for your consideration, and that will give you choices for you to think about.

Back, likely, before lunchtime.

Cheers

Wiz

 

[bob466]

Foxclone is excellent software for doing two things...
1. Creating an image of your system and saving it to an external Drive.
2. Cloning one Drive to another Drive of the same size.

I don't dual-boot...never seen the need and could cause Grub problems as windoze likes to kill the Grub boot loader so I'm told.

If it were me I'd buy a 500GB SSD (no smaller) install Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3 to the whole Drive (I assume it's Cinnamon) then create an image of your system...I think this is the best option. I create an image every 4 to 6 weeks...should anything happen...you just put the image back.
Creating an image requires...Foxclone ISO burnt to a Flash Drive with Etcher and an external HDD/SSD.

Cloning requires two Drives of the same size and this tool...

If you're Cloning one Drive to Another in a Tower you don't need it.
Foxclone instructions are here...https://foxclone.org/uguide.html hope this helps.

 

[JohnJ]

Morning John.

Nothwithstanding the contribution from @APTI above, I can provide you an option that what you seek can likely be effected through the use of Timeshift.

I have an urgent staff matter to attend to first, but once that is done, I will come back here and outline it for your consideration, and that will give you choices for you to think about.

Back, likely, before lunchtime.

Cheers

Wiz

Thanks Wiz. I will hold of 'till you get back to me. No rush. I have just bought a 500gb ssd to replace the one in the laptop so I am ready to go either way. Gosh, aren't ssds cheap nowadays. $149 is a bargain for a ssd with no moving parts I reckon. I got it locally so they needed to put their cut on it but still......

 

[JohnJ]

Foxclone is excellent software for doing two things...
1. Creating an image of your system and saving it to an external Drive.
2. Cloning one Drive to another Drive of the same size.

I don't dual-boot...never seen the need and could cause Grub problems as windoze likes to kill the Grub boot loader so I'm told.

If it were me I'd buy a 500GB SSD (no smaller) install Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3 to the whole Drive (I assume it's Cinnamon) then create an image of your system...I think this is the best option. I create an image every 4 to 6 weeks...should anything happen...you just put the image back.
Creating an image requires...Foxclone ISO burnt to a Flash Drive with Etcher and an external HDD/SSD.

Cloning requires two Drives of the same size and this tool...
View attachment 19234
If you're Cloning one Drive to Another in a Tower you don't need it.
Foxclone instructions are here...https://foxclone.org/uguide.html hope this helps.

Many thanks Bob. I understand. Cheers john

 

[wizardfromoz]

Gosh, aren't ssds cheap nowadays.

Yes, and our American friends get the them even cheaper, thanks to economies of scale with their large marketplace, but things are getting better here as time goes by.

Just have to settle a fight in the schoolyard (another thread) and then "I'll be back!" (best Arnie voice).

(slopes off whinging "A wizard's work is never done")

 

[Condobloke]

on the subject of ssd's.....I came across a SP solid state drive....256GB

It originally came from Amazon (australia), at a price of approx $44 Delivered.

It is unbelievably fast.

 

[wizardfromoz]

John, I'll give you an example from my own experience, if that helps.

A little under 5 years ago, my late wife Elaine and I bought a pigeon pair of Dell Inspiron 5770's laptops. She had hers in the study, and I added a then current Linux Mint to its Windows 10.

I had mine in the garage (not insulated, cold in winter, hot in summer).

The Dells have two drives inbuilt - a 256 GB M2 SSD /dev/sdb and a 2 TB Seagate SATA Windows was on /dev/sdb the SSD.

In addition, I paired with mine an external Western Digital 4 TB MyBook 25EE, powered USB 3, which was /dev/sdc.

You can read from the link in my signature why, but I run anywhere from 75 to 90 Linux distros on my rig. While in the garage, the breakdown was something like

Inspiron - 40 distros on /dev/sda, 13 distros on /dev/sdb
WD MyBook - 22 distros

A number of my distros shipped with Timeshift installed (all the Minties and some Manjaro, Linux Lite and so on) and I installed it on all the others.

Given it is preferable to store your Timeshift snapshots on a different drive, I had the ones from the Inspiron (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb) stored on the Western Digital SATA HDD /dev/sda.

Elaine passed away end of May 2022 coming up 2 years next month, and thereafter followed the "winter of my discontent", in more ways than one - it started to get bloody cold, and the Study has reverse cycle airconditioning, so I decided to commandeer Elaine's Inspiron and move my HQ to there.

In preparation for that move, I cloned the two very large partitions for Timeshift snapshots stored on the garage Inspiron to the MyBook, then simply unplugged its power cord from the wall power outlet and walked it through the house to the study and plugged it in to Elaine's Inspiron.

I then saved any personal data from Elaine's setup elsewhere, reformatted her /dev/sda and /dev/sdb (bye bye Windows) to EXT4, set up one partition of say 20 GB (most of my distros only use < 20 GB), and a UEFI partition of say 512 MB in FAT32 or vfat, and away I went.

I booted up the MyBook, entered any distro I chose, and used Timeshift to restore just one distro, a Mint, onto the study's /dev/sdb, and proceeded from there, to restore all the /dev/sda and /dev/sdb distros from the MyBook to the Inspiron.

I did that with maybe 6 - 7 distros a day, and in less than 2 weeks had the full range on the new setup. Once that was complete, I cloned to the study's Inspiron's /dev/sda the Timeshift snapshots for the MyBook and redeemed that storage space.

I'll summarise the above in my next post, as to how you could use its principles in your situation.

 

[wizardfromoz]

@JohnJ - if you followed the above at all (if not, fire away with questions), all I see you as needing in your circumstances is to do the following, no need for cloning, having partitions sizes just right, and so on

1. Take a current Timeshift of your existing Mintie (include home if not filled with huge amounts of data)
2. On the target drive, format it to EXT4 and then create an EXT4 the same size or larger or smaller if you wish, as the existing install
3. Create an EFI System Partition (ESP) in FAT32 or vfat, size 300 - 500 MB, you can place this at the beginning of the drive or the end of it
4. Launch Timeshift and restore your snapshot, pointing it to your target partition and target ESP
5. Reboot the sytem on completion

Timeshift will handle modifying your file allocation table /etc/fstab to reflect the new setup.

It will also modify your Grub Menu to have the "new" Mintie on top.

Once you have established that everything works OK, you can then redeem the space taken by the original Mintie if you wish.

If you choose that option, then on completion of the erasure, from the "new" Mintie you can then run the Terminal command

sudo update-grub

and reboot to have the Grub Menu updated.

You may likely have more questions, to which we can provide more answers.

A couple of broad references to Timeshift can be found at

https://itsfoss.com/backup-restore-linux-timeshift/

https://www.fosslinux.com/34377/how-to-backup-and-restore-ubuntu-with-timeshift.htm

https://www.fossmint.com/backup-restore-linux-with-timeshift/

and this from Linux Lite Help Manual, and MX-Linux

https://www.linuxliteos.com/manual/tutorials.html#timeshift

https://mxlinux.org/wiki/applications/timeshift/

or read about it and ask questions at my Thread here

https://www.linux.org/threads/timeshift-similar-solutions-safeguard-recover-your-linux.15241/

Wiz

 

[JohnJ]

John, I'll give you an example from my own experience, if that helps.

A little under 5 years ago, my late wife Elaine and I bought a pigeon pair of Dell Inspiron 5770's laptops. She had hers in the study, and I added a then current Linux Mint to its Windows 10.

I had mine in the garage (not insulated, cold in winter, hot in summer).

The Dells have two drives inbuilt - a 256 GB M2 SSD /dev/sdb and a 2 TB Seagate SATA Windows was on /dev/sdb the SSD.

In addition, I paired with mine an external Western Digital 4 TB MyBook 25EE, powered USB 3, which was /dev/sdc.

You can read from the link in my signature why, but I run anywhere from 75 to 90 Linux distros on my rig. While in the garage, the breakdown was something like

Inspiron - 40 distros on /dev/sda, 13 distros on /dev/sdb
WD MyBook - 22 distros

A number of my distros shipped with Timeshift installed (all the Minties and some Manjaro, Linux Lite and so on) and I installed it on all the others.

Given it is preferable to store your Timeshift snapshots on a different drive, I had the ones from the Inspiron (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb) stored on the Western Digital SATA HDD /dev/sda.

Elaine passed away end of May 2022 coming up 2 years next month, and thereafter followed the "winter of my discontent", in more ways than one - it started to get bloody cold, and the Study has reverse cycle airconditioning, so I decided to commandeer Elaine's Inspiron and move my HQ to there.

In preparation for that move, I cloned the two very large partitions for Timeshift snapshots stored on the garage Inspiron to the MyBook, then simply unplugged its power cord from the wall power outlet and walked it through the house to the study and plugged it in to Elaine's Inspiron.

I then saved any personal data from Elaine's setup elsewhere, reformatted her /dev/sda and /dev/sdb (bye bye Windows) to EXT4, set up one partition of say 20 GB (most of my distros only use < 20 GB), and a UEFI partition of say 512 MB in FAT32 or vfat, and away I went.

I booted up the MyBook, entered any distro I chose, and used Timeshift to restore just one distro, a Mint, onto the study's /dev/sdb, and proceeded from there, to restore all the /dev/sda and /dev/sdb distros from the MyBook to the Inspiron.

I did that with maybe 6 - 7 distros a day, and in less than 2 weeks had the full range on the new setup. Once that was complete, I cloned to the study's Inspiron's /dev/sda the Timeshift snapshots for the MyBook and redeemed that storage space.

I'll summarise the above in my next post, as to how you could use its principles in your situation.

Wow...I mean wow! 40 plus distros. When you have more than one distro surely you didn't partition your ssd 40 times. Um, You can see that I don't understand at all where distros store their stuff. I need to get my head out of Windows OS setups. How does a distro operate with 40 different distros. Baby explanation please. I am assuming, probably wrongly, that there is one protected and separate area that is a launch pad for each of those distros and this area is not touched (or is it) when Timeshifting. So assuming you delete one distro and then add another this protected/separate area doesn't care. Maybe there is no protected/separate area and each distro lives and works happily in a fully contained package. Therefore distros don't care if you add or remove a more many distros. I bet I am completely wrong about all this and I look forward to baby steps enlightment. By the way, this sort of stuff is very good to know because it helps to understand how distros live and work, and in your case with other distros. I will now go to your next summarised post. Happy gaining essential knowledge!!

 

[wizardfromoz]

No hurry, mate. Baby steps, as you say. You've got to crawl before you walk, walk before you run, run before you fly.

This place has one of the best think tanks, brains trusts or what have you, on Linux, on the planet, And we are friendly, we like to think.

We are distro-agnostic, that is, we embrace any and all distros as having merit to someone.

Mint is a bloody good place to start, you can only go onwards and upwards.

 

[Condobloke]

Mint is a bloody good place to start, you can only go onwards and upwards

Amen to that.

 

[JohnJ]

@JohnJ - if you followed the above at all (if not, fire away with questions), all I see you as needing in your circumstances is to do the following, no need for cloning, having partitions sizes just right, and so on

1. Take a current Timeshift of your existing Mintie (include home if not filled with huge amounts of data)
2. On the target drive, format it to EXT4 and then create an EXT4 the same size or larger or smaller if you wish, as the existing install
3. Create an EFI System Partition (ESP) in FAT32 or vfat, size 300 - 500 MB, you can place this at the beginning of the drive or the end of it
4. Launch Timeshift and restore your snapshot, pointing it to your target partition and target ESP
5. Reboot the sytem on completion

Timeshift will handle modifying your file allocation table /etc/fstab to reflect the new setup.

It will also modify your Grub Menu to have the "new" Mintie on top.

Once you have established that everything works OK, you can then redeem the space taken by the original Mintie if you wish.

If you choose that option, then on completion of the erasure, from the "new" Mintie you can then run the Terminal command

sudo update-grub

and reboot to have the Grub Menu updated.

You may likely have more questions, to which we can provide more answers.

A couple of broad references to Timeshift can be found at

https://itsfoss.com/backup-restore-linux-timeshift/

https://www.fosslinux.com/34377/how-to-backup-and-restore-ubuntu-with-timeshift.htm

https://www.fossmint.com/backup-restore-linux-with-timeshift/

and this from Linux Lite Help Manual, and MX-Linux

https://www.linuxliteos.com/manual/tutorials.html#timeshift

https://mxlinux.org/wiki/applications/timeshift/

or read about it and ask questions at my Thread here

https://www.linux.org/threads/timeshift-similar-solutions-safeguard-recover-your-linux.15241/

Wiz

Okaaay. You mention in point 1, 'Take a current Timeshift of your existing Minty (include home if not filled with huge amounts of data)'.

In Windows, I have always had a separate data partition on a physically separate drive so if the Windows OS or the physical drive that has Windows on it goes belly up then with my images I can restore Windows and my data is physically protected away from the culprit Windows OS and from the Windows physical drive. So, back to your point 1, Is the home section (I assume this hosts the data) of Linux separate from the Linux OS. If so, then for example could I put home anywhere even on a different physical drive. By the way, even on my current setup (Minty is on my Seperate and removable 500gb ssd that is connected to the laptop via a usb port) I can see and looks like interact with all my many data files I currently have on a separate laptop internal hdd. Considering this, perhaps I should just leave home alone (no pun intended) where it defaults during setup if I never store data on it any way. That is, I will continue to store data on my old hdd on the laptop.

In your point 3, you mention to, 'Create an EFI System Partition (ESP) in FAT32...' in the new drive. I can create a partition no worries to place at the beginning or the end of the drive but what is a 'EFI System Partition (ESP)'. Is this a special type of partition to create or just a partion that becomes a EFI System Partition (ESP).
Your points 4 and 5 and subsequent notes are pretty straight forward.
Happy reading. Hope my dumb questions are not too grating.
Cheers
John

 

[wizardfromoz]

Hope my dumb questions are not too grating.

Not at all, they are reasonable questions.

If you still have Windows 10 bootable, you will already have an ESP. It will be 100 - 500 or so MB in size.

You can see it through Windows' Disk Management facility.

Did you want to check that and come back, or I can go on (after I grab a beer and roll a fag, lol)?

 

[JohnJ]

Not at all, they are reasonable questions.

If you still have Windows 10 bootable, you will already have an ESP. It will be 100 - 500 or so MB in size.

You can see it through Windows' Disk Management facility.

Did you want to check that and come back, or I can go on (after I grab a beer and roll a fag, lol)?

No, that's ok. I just wondered if this is some sort of special thing called a EFI System Partition (ESP) - so much for me bragging I am a Windows guru.
As I said, I can just make a separate Fat32 partition the size you mentioned and park it front or back. Yes?

 

[wizardfromoz]

I can just make a separate Fat32 partition the size you mentioned and park it front or back. Yes?

Yes. You will need to set a couple of "flags" against the fat32 partition, to have it show as boot, esp

My SSD setup shown has my cursor pointing to it

Yours would only have one additional partition to start with, either /dev/sdX1 or /dev/sdX2 , where X is determined by he drive you have placed it on.

My picture is from GParted, the GNOME Partition Editor, which you would either have to install first, or it is on the USB stick or other medium you used to install Linux Mint.

Or you can use the GNOME Disks facility, aka Disks, already installed on your Mintie, and available through your Start Menu.