Move Odroid filesystem to SSD

odroid_to_ssd.sh

## Instructions to switch odroid over to external ssd
# You shouldn’t see any errors when running this process, if you do. Stop immediately and ask me. 

# run lsblk to see all the hard drives. You should see a line starting with mmcblk0 and then 2 more underneath it with
# mmcblk0p1 and mmcblk0p2. That’s the sd card disk and the sd card partitions. You’ll also see a line starting with
# sda (and/or sdb if there are two usb drives). We want to use the sd* one.  
lsblk 

#pull out some of the values from lsblk so we can automate the rest of the script
read new_partition new_drive mountpoint <<< `lsblk -e 179 -l -o NAME,PKNAME,FSTYPE,MOUNTPOINT |grep 'vfat\s*/media/odroid' | awk {'print $1" "$2" "$4'}`

# after you run this command, verify that it matches the mount point and partition of the usb drive you identified 
# in the first step. if you’re not 100% sure here, ask me. 
echo "about to unmount $mountpoint on /dev/$new_partition"

export new_drive="/dev/$new_drive"
export new_partition="/dev/$new_partition"
umount $mountpoint

# repartition the file ssd
sudo parted --script $new_drive mklabel gpt
sudo parted --align optimal $new_drive mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
# after running the last command, you may see:
# “Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.” 
# If that’s all you see then that’s fine. If there’s any other output from that command, let me know.

# switch the file system to ext4. You might need to approve this manually
sudo mkfs -t ext4 -L rootfs $new_partition

# make a place for the ssd to mount to, and mount it
sudo mkdir /mnt/ssd
sudo mount $new_partition /mnt/ssd

# transfer all the files over from the sd card to the new ssd
sudo rsync -aAXv --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} / /mnt/ssd

# get current partition 
export current_uuid=`blkid -o value /dev/mmcblk0p2 | sed -n '2p'`

# get the new UUID 
export new_uuid=`blkid -o value $new_partition | sed -n '2p'`

# backup the boot.ini just in case
sudo cp /media/boot/boot.ini /media/boot/boot.ini.bak

# update boot partition so that the kernel knows to boot off of the new HD
sudo sed -i "s/${current_uuid}/${new_uuid}/" /media/boot/boot.ini

# update mount the new partition as the root partition
sudo sed -i "s/${current_uuid}/${new_uuid}/" /mnt/ssd/etc/fstab

# We're done. Check /mnt/ssd/ includes all the files you would expect it to and reboot
sudo reboot

Thanks for this script, which explained a lot for me. Obviously I didn't use it "as is", I think nobody does this, but it provided me a lot of insights.

Some comments:
Line 10 gave no results for me, since lsblk -e 179 -l -o NAME,PKNAME,FSTYPE,MOUNTPOINT returns

NAME PKNAME FSTYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda
sda1 sda    ext4   /mnt/SDD

Line 38 did what it should, but line 41 did not. blkid -o value /dev/sda1returns

0255ed91-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
ext4
a4b5xxxx-xx

So new_uuid becomes ext4.

Line 47 did not fit for me, because rootargs contained root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 instead of root=UUID=xxx….

Thank you anyway, your script helped me a lot.

On which odroid has this been tested? My N2+ did not boot with the root partition on a ssd ...

I can’t remember. I worked on this a number of years ago. Sorry!

Hi Ryross, thanks a lot. The script is not working on my Odroid XU4, but, as written by Jammon, I used it to undertstand concepts.
And to solve an issue I had: randomly after some days my odroid turns off if the rootfs moved to SSD.
My "migration to SSD" method is similar to yours but with a difference: in yours what makes the difference is the usage of GPT instead of MBR.
My SSD size is < 2TB so also MBR can be used, but probably not so stable as GPT.
After I passed to GPT my Odroid is stable and no more turns off. Thanks.