[nmglug] Cloning again

[Akkana Peck]

Brian O'Keefe writes:
>    Now what I'd like to do is clone my 250GB SSD to a 1TB SSD for the   
>    added space. I had already cloned my 250GB drive onto the 1TB but    
>    never upgraded it as I wanted to do. So I have a several months      
>    old cloned drive of 300GB partition and the remainder unformatted    
>    space. What I don't know is if I need to reformat the 1TB drive in   
>    any manner or just delete the 300GB partition and have a 1 TB,       
>    unformatted drive, as it came when new. Or, do I need to delete      
>    the partitions and either have all 1TB unformatted or format the     
>    1TB as ext4 or something?                                            

Some options:

If you don't care about preserving what's on the drive now:
format the whole 1TB as ext4 (or your favorite Linux filesystem if it's something else). I tend to use gparted because I'm nervous about typing fdisk commands, but fdisk or other tools are fine too if you prefer them.
(This is the option I'd probably take.)

If you want to preserve the data that's on the drive now, and it's a reasonable filesystem already:
use gparted to resize the 300GB partition to take up the whole drive. This probably will be fairly fast, because it won't have to move any data, just enlarge the partition to use up the free space.

If you want to preserve the 250GB clone exactly, and use the rest of the drive for other backups:
use gparted to make a new partition taking up the free space on the disk and format it to ext4.

        ...Akkana