Last Updated on April 24, 2026
Upgrading your Linux rig with a massive new NVMe drive or a faster SSD is an exciting project, but the thought of reinstalling your entire operating system is completely dreadful. Nobody wants to spend their weekend setting up environments, re-downloading packages, and tweaking configurations from scratch.
Fortunately, you don’t have to. You can easily clone your entire Linux OS hard drive and move it directly to a new disk or a completely different computer.
In this guide, we are walking through the exact process of migrating your Linux installation using Clonezilla. It is a completely free, open-source tool that perfectly copies every single bit of data from your old drive to your new one. Let’s dive into the setup.
Identifying Your Source and Destination Drives
Before we even touch the cloning software, both your old hard drive and your brand-new empty drive need to be plugged into the computer.
You must know exactly how your system identifies these two drives. Getting this wrong later means accidentally wiping your entire operating system. You have two easy ways to check this:
Method 1: Use the GUI Disk Tool
Open your application menu and search for “Disks” to launch the built-in drive manager. You will see a visual layout of your drives. Pay close attention to the device path (like /dev/sda) and the total capacity.
Method 2: Use the Terminal
Open your console and type the command lsblk. This prints a clean tree of all connected storage devices. Note which label belongs to your current OS drive (usually sda) and which belongs to your new blank drive (usually sdb).
Booting Up and Configuring Clonezilla
We will be using Clonezilla to handle the heavy lifting. Head over to their official site, download the ISO file, and burn it to a bootable USB flash drive using a tool like Rufus or BalenaEtcher.
Restart your computer, enter your BIOS/UEFI boot menu, and select your USB drive to boot into the Clonezilla environment.
Navigating the Startup Menus
Clonezilla runs entirely entirely on text menus. You navigate using your keyboard arrow keys and press Enter to confirm your choices. Just follow this quick setup sequence to get to the main cloning screen:
- Choose Clonezilla Live at the very first boot screen.
- Select your preferred language (English is the default).
- Keep the default keyboard layout when prompted.
- Select Start Clonezilla.
Choose your keyboard configurationChoose Start Clonezilla
Now you will choose the device-device – work directly from a disk partition to a disk or partition selection since we will be doing a disk to disk clone.
Setting Up the Disk-to-Disk Clone
Now we are at the main interface. Because both hard drives are currently plugged directly into the motherboard, select the device-device option. This tells the software we are working locally, rather than pulling an image file over a network.
Next, select Beginner mode. This hides the overly complex parameters and keeps the process perfectly safe for a standard OS migration.
Finally, select disk_to_local_disk. This confirms we are taking the entire contents of drive A and dumping them onto drive B.
The Critical Step: Selecting Source and Destination
Stop and double-check your screen right now. This is the only part of the process where a mistake can cost you your data.
First, Clonezilla asks for the Source Disk. This is your old drive. Look closely at the sizes listed on the screen to verify you are picking the drive holding your actual Linux OS.
Next, it asks for the Destination Disk. Select your brand new, blank drive. Anything currently sitting on this destination drive is about to be permanently destroyed and overwritten.
Final Parameters
- When asked about repairing file systems, you can safely select Skip checking/repairing unless you suspect your old hard drive is actively failing.
- When asked about partition tables, select Use the partition table from the source disk. This perfectly replicates your original partition sizes.
Finally, choose what you want the computer to do when the cloning finishes. Selecting “Choose” will just prompt you when it is done, allowing you to power off the machine manually.
Clonezilla will give you one last giant warning prompt in yellow text asking “Are you sure you want to continue?” Type Y and press Enter.
The software will take over, displaying progress bars as it copies data block by block. Depending on the size of your drive and the speed of your hardware, this can take anywhere from ten minutes to over an hour.
When the cloning process is complete, you will be notified and then you can press enter to continue to the next step which was the action you chose to perform when completed.
If you chose the first option (choose), you will then be prompted to select one of the following options (power off, reboot, enter the command line, or start over).
Post-Cloning: How to Use Your New Space
Once the cloning process is completely finished, shut down the computer. Unplug your old hard drive entirely and turn the machine back on. Your computer should immediately boot into your Linux desktop, looking exactly the way you left it.
However, there is one common catch. If you cloned a 50GB drive onto a brand new 500GB drive, your Linux OS will still think you only have 50GB of space available. Because we copied the exact partition table, the extra 450GB is currently sitting there as “unallocated space.”
How to claim your missing storage:
- Boot into your newly cloned Linux drive.
- Open an application like GParted (you may need to install it via your package manager).
- Locate your primary OS partition.
- Right-click the partition and select Resize/Move.
- Drag the slider all the way to the right to fill the empty unallocated space.
- Click the green checkmark to apply the operations.
You now have a perfectly cloned operating system with full access to your brand-new storage capacity!
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