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Has anyone ever cloned a disk with the GPT partition scheme?

So, I’m trying to clone an SSD to an NVME drive and I’m bumping into this “dev-disk-by” error when I boot from the NVME (the SSD is unplugged).

I can’t find anyone talking about this in this context. It seems like what I’ve done here should be fine and should work, but there’s clearly something I and the arch wiki are missing.

adespoton ,

I know it’s not what you meant, but I just imagined someone typing in “pretend you are a disk cloning utility and output the code needed to clone /dev/disk0 to /dev/disk1 in as efficient a manner as possible.”

Seems to me that using rdisk would be significantly faster than disk, as disk pipes all the data through a superfluous serial channel?

Dark_Arc OP ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

What does that have to do with any of this?

Are you just trying to start a whimsical side conversation?

4z01235 ,

Your title mentioned GPT as in the partition table. The other user thought about ChatGPT.

Dark_Arc OP ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Thanks for translating … my brain is completely fried from fighting with this.

mozz ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Oooooohhh

That's why they are getting downvotes 🙂

catloaf ,

What did you do to clone it? What’s in the fstab, or however you’re mounting it?

Blaster_M ,

You need to make sure both /etc/fstab and the boot cfg are pointing to the new partitions. Since they are using uuid, if the uuid changes due to the method used to clone, it won’t find the disk partition.

Dark_Arc OP ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

They’re identical to what they were in the original drive, I’ve verified it in gparted on a live image.

It’s driving me crazy because I can literally find this drive by that UUID in a live image, but when I go to boot the system has no idea what that is.

tal , (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I’m confused. You say that you’re booting off that drive that it can’t find. Like, this is your root drive?

But I believe that the kernel finding the root drive should happen much earlier than this. Like, you’ve got systemd stuff there on the screen. For that to happen, I’d think that you’d need to have your root drive already up and mounted. Grub hands that off to the kernel, believe that it’s specified in /etc/default/grub on my Debian system, then gets written out when you run sudo update-grub.

If I’m not misunderstanding that you are saying that the drive in question is your root drive, are you sure that this isn’t happening because there’s a reference to the drive – maybe another partition or something – in /etc/fstab is failing to find something?

Or maybe I’m just misunderstanding what you’re saying.

EDIT: if you just want to get it working, unless you’ve got some kind of exotic setup, I expect that you can probably boot into a very raw mode by, from grub, passing init=/bin/sh on the kernel command line. A lot of stuff won’t be functional if you do that, since you’ll just be running a shell and the kernel, but as long as you have a root filesystem, it’ll probably come up. Then I’d mount -o remount,rw / so that you can modify your root drive, and then fiddle your /etc/fstab into shape. Probably a live distro is more comfortable to work in, but if all you need is to get the regular system up, I’d think that fiddling with /etc/fstab is likely all you need to do that.

EDIT2: and then I’d probably compare the output of blkid to your fstab, from within the boot in your regular system, if that isn’t what you already did.

Dark_Arc OP , (edited )
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

I’m giving up on my dd attempt and trying clonezilla (a highly regarded option it seems).

But yeah, welcome to exactly what’s driving me crazy. The dd “worked”, grub loads, it starts loading Linux … and then it gets caught trying to find… itself (?)

Like the exact drive that’s missing is the drive it would have to find to even be partially operational. The other drives weren’t touched and the original drive is unplugged.

There is a btrfs subvolume and they’re both part of the same drive … but it was also copied bit for bit.

IDK… We’ll see whether clonezilla works. I’ve been using Linux over ten years, it’s been a long time since I’ve been this confused.

tal , (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I mean, if you want to start over, that’s your call, but in all honesty, my guess is that all you have to change from your current situation is a line of text in fstab. I don’t believe that changing the cloning method is going to change that.

EDIT: maybe the UUID is for a swap partition or similar in fstab?

EDIT2: This guy is describing a very similar sounding situation (though it’s not clear if he unplugged his original drive before trying to use his cloned one, so might have had duplicate UUIDs).

unix.stackexchange.com/…/systemd-is-eternally-stu…

He thinks that some users have “fixed the problem” by creating a swap partition with gparted.

Multiple forums have had users with similar issues and they fixed it with a GParted-made Swap partition and adding that partition’s UUID to /etc/fstab like…

That would, I expect, generate a new UUID for the swap partition via calling mkswap and then they’re putting the UUID into their fstab.

Just saying that I’d personally do that, confirm that the UUIDs listed in fstab conform to what blkid is saying before starting all over, because I don’t think that dd or another utility for copying disk contents will likely produce a different result.

Dark_Arc OP ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Clonezilla just worked. The fstab is unmodified/identical to what dd gave me.

I really have no idea what clonezilla did differently. Its output was so fast… But yeah, it just worked with that. So I guess I’ll take it.

Absolutely baffling.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Aight, well, glad to hear it.

Dark_Arc OP ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Thanks and thanks for the effort you put in.

s38b35M5 ,
@s38b35M5@lemmy.world avatar

Clonezilla runs lots of tasks after (and before) dd that are in the log file(s) on the live environment before you reboot. I haven’t used it in a while, but I’m confident that one of the tasks is updating grub

Dark_Arc OP ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

I did update grub via a chroot as one of my troubleshooting steps… So I don’t think that was it either. I actually recall it saying something about skipping updating grub (because it was a GPT system without some special flag set I think).

I remember seeing it do something to the EFI stuff explicitly and I’m wondering if maybe that’s where it did something I didn’t.

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