My work computer runs Debian 11 bullseye (the current stable release) in a mechanical 500GB disk, and I was provided with a new SDD disk but its size was 480 GB. So I had to shrink my partitions before copying the data to the new disk. It turned out to be a bit difficult because my main partition was encrypted.
I write here how I did, maybe there are other simpler ways but I couldn’t find them.
References:
- https://linux-blog.anracom.com/2018/11/09/shrinking-an-encrypted-partition-with-lvm-on-luks/
- https://askubuntu.com/questions/844132/how-to-repair-boot-on-luks-encrypted-harddrive
- https://discovery.endeavouros.com/system-rescue/arch-chroot-for-efi-uefi-systems/2021/03/
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/693101/reinstall-grub-grub-install-warning-efi-variables-are-not-supported-on-this-s
I had three partitions in my old 500GB disk: /dev/sda1 is the EFI partition, /dev/sda2 the boot partition and /dev/sda3 the root partition (encrypted, with LVM, the standard way the Debian installer proposes when you choose a simple encrypted setup).
First of all, I made a disk image with Clonezilla to an external USB disk, just in case I mess up things, to be able to return to a safe point and start again.
Then I started my computer with a Debian 11 live USB with KDE Plasma desktop and Spanish localisation environment.
I opened the KDE Partition manager and copied the non encrypted partitions (sda1, EFI and sda2, /boot) to the new disk.
I shrinked the encrypted partition from the terminal with the following commands (I had enough free space so reduced my partition to a total of 300GB):
Removed the swap partition and re-created it:
sudo lvremove /dev/larjona-pc-vg/swap_1
sudo pvresize --setphysicalvolumesize 380G /dev/mapper/cryptdisk
sudo pvchange -x y /dev/mapper/cryptdisk
sudo lvcreate -L 4G -n swap_1 larjona-pc-vg
sudo mkswap -L swap_1 /dev/larjona-pc-vg/swap_1Display information about the physical volume in order to shrink it:
sudo pvs -v --segments --units s /dev/mapper/cryptdisk
sudo cryptsetup -b 838860800 resize cryptdisk
sudo cryptsetup status cryptdisk
sudo vgchange -a n vgroup
sudo vgchange -an
sudo cryptsetup luksClose cryptdiskThen reduced the sda3 partition with the KDE partition manager (it took a while), and copy it to the new disk.
Turned off the computer and unplugged the old disk. Started the computer with the Debian 11 Live USB again, UEFI boot.
Now, to make my system boot:
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 crypdisk
sudo vgscan --mknodes
sudo vgchange -ay
sudo mount /dev/mapper/larjona--pc--vg-root /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
mount --rbind /sys /media/linux/sys
mount -t efivarfs none /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
sudo chroot /mntThen edited /mnt/etc/crypttab to reflect the name of the new encrypted partition, edited /mnt/etc/fstab to paste the UUIDs of the new partitions.
Then ran grub-install and reinstalled the kernels as noted in the reference, rebooted and logged in my Plasma desktop 🙂
(Well, the actual process was not so smooth but after several tries and errors and searching for help I managed to get the needed commands to make my system boot from the new disk).
The bright side 