I’ve had my OG Steam Deck since the first units rolled out. I love it and I’m planning to upgrade to the OLED model and pass this one on to my brother.

I have spent lots of hours downloading things, tweaking and configuring, etc. I have a lot on my SD card which will be an easy swap over. Howeve… how best do I clone the SSD of the original to the oled?

I was thinking maybe hook them together via USB-C and use konsole for Linux dd command to duplicate over to the oled SD. IDK honestly. Anyone who’s planning to upgrade to the OLED how are you moving all your data from your internal storage over ?

  • minneyar@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I was thinking maybe hook them together via USB-C and use konsole for Linux dd command to duplicate over to the oled SD.

    You’re on the right path, but that won’t work because the Deck isn’t a host device; you can’t just plug them into each other and see the other one’s storage media.

    Also, keep in mind that if you use dd to clone one disk on to another, you’re also cloning the partition table from the original disk. If the target disk is larger, you’ll also have to first expand the partition to fill the whole disk, then also expand the filesystem to fill the partition.

    I can tell you what I’d do, but I only use Linux on my desktop computer; there are probably similar Windows tools for doing this, but I’m not familiar with them.

    First, assuming you have a computer with an empty NVMe slot or a USB NVMe drive reader and a hard drive that has enough space to hold an image of the original disk:

    1. Plug the source disk into your computer, dd to dump the original disk
    2. Remove it, plug in the target disk, use dd to copy the image to the target disk
    3. Use gparted to resize the partition to fill the new disk
    4. Use resize2fs to resize the filesystem to fill the entire partition

    After doing that, you can put the target disk back in the Deck and it will probably work, but no guarantees since I’ve never tried it.