Currently I have Mint Linux 19 installed on a 2TB hard drive. I will be cloning the installation to a 500GB SSD in the next few days. My installation takes about 75GB at the moment (I just moved 700GB of files to a separate data drive).


To resize the partition I will be booting a "Live" installation USB stick and running gparted. Later on I will clone from the 2TB HDD to the 500GB SSD.

[edit] I just discovered that the disk utility in Mint can shrink the volume without the need for booting a "live" installation. Should I do this? [/edit]

What I want to know is if I should consolidate free space before resizing, or will gprarted move files if they are at the end of the 2TB drive so that the fit on the 500GB drive?


Is there anything I should know or do during this process?


Thanks!

It's very unclear what you mean. Are you doing your own bespoke distro for strangers to install? Are you creating template for other machines in your home/company? Are you doing your own bespoke distro for you to install in other places, adjusting as needed?

Please clarify.

You are migrating your HD to SSD.
You don't say how many partitions you have or whether you have an efi boot - but..

You don't need to consolidate a partition before shrinking it (but do leave some spare space for future use).

Not if you are shrinking your / or /home partition(s).
The partition must be unmounted whilst it is being resized by gparted.

Your idea of booting from a live distro stick is the correct one.

Take a backup first!

If your cloning procedure can't handle the target partition being smaller than the source, don't use that procedure.
Simply copying your data (as you apparently already have for your data drive) is the best solution. Writing "unused" blocks needlessly to a SSD is a really bad idea.
Even the EFI partition can be just copied - for the boot entries you'll need run grub-install and possibly update-grub too. No idea how Win10 will react if you have that (EFI).

For common Linux filesystems (say ext4) you can resize on-the-fly - including the root. Note this is not true of xfs. Likewise the swap has to be managed separately if you are planning on resizing that.
Nothing is ever as straightforrward as it first seems ...

not necessary in my experience; i think it has to do with how journaling filesystems handle these things physically.
anyhow, if you shrink the partition gparted will do whatever is required.

I can't say for sure with Linux Mint, but I assume the answer is "no" based on my experience. Defragmenting the partition is part of the resize process. At least it is in Mageia. I'm pretty sure resizing would not work if defragmenting/copying was not part of the process.

There could also be potential effects from resizing an encrypted partition.

Well, for what it's worth...


I booted my Mint Linux installer USB stick and used gparted to resize the partition under 400GB and then copied the partition to the new drive.


Everything went fine. No surprises at all.