I would achieve this as follows, but there may be better solutions. 1. Create a partition and a file system on the new drive. Mount the new file system somewhere, e.g., /tmp/new 2. If the old partition is currently mounted as your root file system, bind mount the partition on the old drive, e.g., Mkdir /tmp/partition Mount --bind / /tmp/partition This will ensure that any device files (e.g., under /dev, used during the boot process) are properly available for copying. 3. Use rsync to copy the files over. Recommended rsync options are rsync -qaHAXS /tmp/partition/ /tmp/new/ See section 4 of https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rsync 4. Install a boot loader on the new drive, if necessary, using grub-install or whatever is appropriate. Warning: I haven't done this, so please correct and adjust as necessary to make it work. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of David Mehler Sent: Tuesday, December 26, 2017 12:33 PM To: blind-sysadmins <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] cloning a vm virtual drive Hello, I'm using VMware workstation and have a vm with a separate virtual drive. It is now full. What I'm wanting to do is add a new virtual hard drive, a larger one, this I can do. I'm then needing to clone the smaller drive to the larger one growing the partition size. So say a 40gb drive to a 60gb drive, the partition would be sixty gb in size. For reference this is on a Ubuntu 17.04 vm. I'd like to use Linux tools. Any help appreciated. Thanks. Dave. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins