What you're planning seems plausible.
You could also resize the partition on (1) to fit on (2), then dd if=(1) of=(2)
If you're interested in structural changes that make this sort of thing easier in the future, look into
You could use clonezilla right? If the data of the old drive "fits" in the new smaller drive, then it can be done (if I correctly recall, it's one of the advanced options).
https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/02_Restore_disk_image/advanced/09-advanced-param.php
Or rescuezilla which might be easier to use.
In short, you can just copy your whole system, you can use rsync, cp or dd. Two things need to be taken care of:
uefi boot needs to be working (copy uefi partition from old drive or reinstall with grub from live iso)
partitions in /etc/fstab need to be configured correctly
Everything else ist just the files and configs. Prefer using rsync -A over cp. In Linux everything is a file, except /dev and /procfs
Don't forget to fix hostname and network config if not using network manager.
Your idea should work no problem btw. though, since uefi and fstab is taken care of by the previous clean install. You should probably not overwrite fstab in that case IMHO.
ReaR (RElax And Recover) can help you create a bootable "recover" installation on target system, once installed rsync your data
You could just use dd to copy the old drive over the new one then resize the partitions. Or you could partition the new drive and dd copy the slices you want to cut over then resize the filesystems.
Can I dd from a bigger drive to a smaller one and expect all the data to come with it?
(Assuming of course there's not more data on the bigger drive than will fit on the smaller)
No, dd won’t work reliably when copying from a larger drive to a smaller one. To do this, you would need to resize and align the partitions first, handling each partition individually, or use a different cloning method.
A better approach is to use something like Clonezilla. In advanced mode, it allows you to clone from a bigger disk to a smaller one, provided that the used space on the source drive does not exceed the capacity of the target drive. Without this, it won’t be possible with any tool, not just dd.
Here’s a tutorial for Clonezilla advanced mode:
https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/11_lite_server/advanced/09-advanced-param.php
(edit added link, and saw the second post just before me with the same answer, not trying to steal from it @ProfessorNeurus@programming.dev, sorry!, you posted while I wrote mine, so please feel free to ignore this, feels so dumb to just delete posts)
You would want the source partitions to be equal to or smaller than the target. You would need to resize them first
dd
dd between two different hard drives?
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