Here’s what I ended up doing:

When the SSD arrived, I put it in the 2nd slot. Then, I booted Ubuntu in a Live USB and created the same partition layout in the new disk with parted.

1. Create the EFI partition and give it the same size
2. Do the same for the ext4 boot partition
3. Create a btrfs partition and give it the remaining size.
4. Encrypt this new partition with cryptsetup and mount it with the option luksOpen of cryptsetup.

Next thing was mounting the partitions of the old drive. And now, to clone the disk I first tried with brtfs-clone but as the size of what first were 220 GB increased to 260 GB, I tried just using btrfs send from the old disk and piping it to btrfs receive to the new disk. However the size didn’t change and still was 260GB, no idea why. I didn’t use dd because some comments recommended btrfs send/receive as it doesn’t copy the whole partition including empty space.

Once that was done I copied the /boot/efi and /boot partitions using cp and changed the uuids in /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab to match the new partitions UUIDs (to know which UUID was each partition, I just used blkid and grep’ed the type of partition. For instance if I was looking for the new partition to replace the one with UUID a1b2c3, I would just use blkid | grep a1b2c3 and if it said it was a crypto partition, then blkid | grep crypto). Finally I deleted the Microsoft folder from /boot/efi as I would only use that disk for Linux.

So then I tried booting from that disk (and removed the other) but Grub was a mess - it just showed the command line. After some (stressful) hours, I found out that it was because Grub itself when first installed saves the UUID of the disk where the config is and searches for it there - so it was not using the config in the new drive.

Again, booted Ubuntu and mounted the new drive partitions. There I tried to just reinstall Grub in the boot partition but it seemed impossible because of some weird errors. So I just changed the UUIDs in Grub related files such as /boot/grub/grub.cfg and /etc/default/grub.

Tried booting again but as noticed earlier Grub was not loading the config file I edited, it was still trying to use the old one in the old drive which was removed and had the original UUIDs. Maybe just changing the UUIDs there would have done the trick but I didn’t try.

It was in that moment that I discovered the existence of configfile - a command that can be used from Grub’s shell to boot with the specified config file. Then I used configfile disk_and_path_to_grubcfg and bang! The OS selection screen appeared. At that time I had already put the old disk in the other slot as I thought everything was solved.

To my surprise, when I selected to boot fedora and typed my password to decrypt the drive, I booted to Fedora in the old drive! How could that be, if I really made sure that I was booting Grub from the new disk? So now the problem was that I was booting Grub (manually with configfile) from the new disk but the OS I was booting was in the old one.

After some time researching, the culprit was that while I changed the UUIDs in the grub.cfg config file, Fedora doesn’t add its kernel entries to that file but to the /boot/loader/entries directory. And there were the files I had to modify (just replacing the old UUIDs). One reboot (maybe also update-grub to update Grub config) and that was it, solved.

However there was one more thing to do. As I didn’t want to use the configfile command every time I boot, I just reinstalled grub.

So that was it. Hope it is useful for anyone who needs to do the same. Although the story doesn’t end there, because the new drive turned out to be defective and I had to order a new one to which I dd’ed (not going through all that again). You live and you learn!

Now I want to hear about The Lord of the Rings lore

I think I’ll take a backup then try to clone the disk with btrfs send/receive and keep that as a solution in case something goes wrong. Thanks for answering!

I see, I like this approach. However as Fedora installs Grub (and I don’t want to have a headache), I think I’ll stick with it. Thanks for sharing all your knowledge!

This is the first thing I thought. However I’m concerned about grub not recognising my partitions and causing my laptop to basically not boot. Did you have any problem with this? Also, if you copied the encrypted drive and kept it encrypted, was there any change you had to do?

Thanks for your answer. Would Grub still see everything as usual or is any change needed too? Also how would I go about having the same exact layout? Use the Fedora Installer on the new drive and put the same password for encryption, creating the same partitions and giving them the same size?

big time NO on clonezilla and friends.

Can you explain? Another comment recommended clonezilla. I remember reading something like this, but knowing more would be nice.

Thanks everyone for your comments and opinions. I ordered the Pixel 8.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. In fact here there are shops for second hand devices, but considering I need the phone to last for at least 5 years (for the uni degree), I don’t think a second hand option seems very appealing to me, as probably the battery life of the device would be reduced and I don’t know if it could be unlockable.

In any case, I could buy a new 7 series but the shop where the discount is offered only has the 7a and the 8 and 8 pro. The discount for the 7a is only 50€ because it is a different offer instead of the 11/11 one (the store says it’s a black friday offer, not the 11/11), so it is 459€.

Google says it’ll get guaranteed Android updates until at least March 2026, and security updates until May 2028. The 8 series get both Android and security updates until October 2030.

I have seen what you said that Graphene hinted that the 7 series will probably get Android updates until their end of life, which is good to hear.

I have been struggling with this decision for some months, and you’re right that nowadays phones are too overpowered and have processors that are better than needed. So the decision is to either get the 7a for 459€ and have 5 years of support or the 8 for 623€ and have 7 years.

I’m indeed very sensitive to the price. However, here in the EU the prices are much higher and a Pixel 7a costs 509€ in Google store and the 6a 349€.

I’ve been using my phone for almost 6 years now and now that I started uni I need a phone that doesn’t crash when opening Gmail or takes too long to do any thing. I’m sure the 7, 7a or 6a can do this fine but I’m trying to get the 8 because of the 7 years support so I can flash graphene and forget, while the others have less than 5 years if I buy them now.

And yes it is a huge amount of cash for me, I never had a phone that expensive, but I feel like I need a phone like this one and its original price is almost 200€ more expensive so that’s why I’m asking here. Can’t even consider iPhone as they’re literally unaffordable for me.

The prices are really high, I hope it gets better when Black Friday arrives. Else I guess I’ll have to get the 7.