Migrating Raspberry Pi System from SSD to TF Card

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Recently, due to the rising price of SSDs, I didn’t want to buy a new one. Since I already had a 1TB SSD on my Raspberry Pi, I decided to migrate the system from the SSD to a TF card so I could free up the SSD for my PC. That’s how this migration guide came about.

Before starting the migration, you can first check how much space is currently used on your SSD. I used lsblk and found that only 35GB was in use, meaning my 64GB TF card is more than sufficient.

Next, you can begin the migration. First, unmount the mounted disk using sudo umount <mount point>. If you encounter a message like is busy, it means the disk is currently in use. You can run lsof +D <disk path> to see which process is using it, then stop that process or forcefully terminate it with the kill command. Once all disks are unmounted, you can proceed with the migration.

First, partition the TF card. Use lsblk to identify the TF card device (assume it is /dev/mmcblk0), then run sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0 to partition it. Create two partitions: one for boot and one for root. The boot partition is recommended to be 512MB, and the remaining space should be allocated to root. After partitioning, you will have /dev/mmcblk0p1 and /dev/mmcblk0p2. Then format them with the following commands:

bash

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblk0p1
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2

After formatting, mount the partitions:

bash

sudo mkdir /mnt/tfboot
sudo mkdir /mnt/tfroot

sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/tfboot
sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /mnt/tfroot

Once mounted, you can start copying data from the SSD. Here we use rsync because it only copies used data, unlike dd, which copies the entire disk size.

First, copy the boot contents using:

bash

sudo rsync -axHAWXS --numeric-ids --info=progress2 \
/ /mnt/tfroot \
--exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"}

Then copy the root contents:

bash

sudo rsync -ax /boot/ /mnt/tfboot/

Next, update the configuration. Use sudo blkid to get the UUID and PARTUUID of /dev/mmcblk0p2. Then edit /mnt/tfboot/cmdline.txt to update the UUID and PARTUUID accordingly. After that, modify /mnt/tfroot/etc/fstab to look like this:

UUID=xxxx  /      ext4  defaults,noatime  0 1
UUID=xxxx  /boot  vfat  defaults          0 2

Finally, shut down the system with sudo poweroff, remove the SSD, and power it back on. The system will now boot from the TF card, and the migration is complete!