Topic: unable to copy partition [SOLVED]
Aloha ! I have 3 drives on this machine
/sda which is the boot drive running Ubuntu 16.04
/sdb which is the intended source drive. I want to copy the data from a partition which only has 681 Gib of data in a 1.8Tib Ext4 partition
/sdc which is the intended destination drive. I used gparted to shrink an Ext4 partition on this drive leaving me with 839 Gib of unallocated space.
When I right click on the source partition, I am able to use the copy command but when I right click on the target unallocated free space, I am unable to paste as the paste command is grayed out.
Do I have to shrink the source partition so it is smaller than the target partition even though the amount of data in the source partition is smaller than target partition? Would it make more sense to use dd to copy the data?
/sdb was starting to fail so I used ddrescue to backup /sdb to yet another drive not presently connected to the machine. ddrescue reported that it was able to recover all the data, however the backup drive is not bootable, there is just one big Loop (?) partition on it. Is there a way to use gparted to transform the backup into a useable, bootable drive? If not can you point me in the right direction please?