Storyline

I use my gaming laptop as a daily driver for streaming and coding since I shifted to a new city. The base storage of the laptop is a 128G ssd in which I have a running archlinux installation with EFI boot partition and Linux filesystem partition. Now I wanted to play games on Lutris but my root partition only being 128G I need more space for more games.
I bought a 500G ssd and an external M.2 to USB adapter so that I can move my installation there.

Execution

First we need to create a similar partition table in the new ssd. Lets say when we connected the ssd using the external M.2 USB adapter its being detected as /dev/sdc. Check the device from the following command.

sudo fdisk -l

Lets say our root file system is on device

/dev/nvme0n1, check the partition table against /dev/nvme0n1 by using the same command as above

sudo fdisk -l

In my case I have two partitions against nvme0n1

nvme0n1p1 300M EFI System
nvme0n1p2 118.9G Linux filesystem

Now I will try to replicate a similar file system to /dev/sdc

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc
# now press m from help

• press g to create a new gpt partition table
• press n to create the first partition
• press enter to accept the default starting sector
• then enter +300M to create a partition with ending sector allowing a 300MB partition

• press t to change the partition type
• press L to list all existing partition numbers and choose the number listed against the EFI System otherwise the default would be linux filesystem

• In my case EFI System is listed against 1 so I enter 1 as input and press enter

After the partitions has been created we can replicate data from one partition to another using dd command

# copy the EFI System data
sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p1 of=/dev/sdc1

# copy the linux filesystem data
sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p2 of=/dev/sdc2

• Now use we need to resize the dd filesystem of sdc2 to allow the whole ssd space

sudo resize2fs /dev/sdc2

We are not done yet we still need to refresh the boot partition grub settings against the new storage in which we replicated the file system,

• First create a linux bootable live usb, in my case I am using ubuntu.
• Replace the ssd with the new ssd and bootup the system using the live usb created.
• Now we need to manually mount the partitions before we can update grub
• First we mount the linux file system partition

# first we mount the linux file system
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt

# then we mount the EFI partition
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot/efi

# then we bind mount before performing chroot
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys

# now we perform the chroot command
sudo chroot /mnt

# now we perform the grub install and grub update commands
grub-install

• Now we are done. Reboot the system and boot from the storage device itself the operating system should boot up fine