Trying to clone drive put it in another computer

[glin22]

Hi,

I spent about 5 hours last night trying to clone a hard drive from a working LL2.8 system and wanted to put the cloned drive in a 2nd machine. I tried a whole bunch of things like clonezilla, unetbootin, command line using sudo dd, but I couldn't seem to get anything that would boot properly. The drive I am cloning works fine both in the 1st computer and also in the 2nd machine. I had a backup I did on the working drive with SystemBack and since I wasn't getting anywhere I thought I'd try installing the system using that. After doing that, I do bootup from that drive I installed the system on but it spits me out at an initramfs prompt, it says the UUID doesn't exsit. I guess the UUID from the first drive is still there and not the new drive's one. Can this install be salvaged at all ?

If you have any ideas or suggestions for me to try please let me know as I am at a loss at what to do next.

Thanks,

Glin22

[Richard B]

Hi Glin22. You may have moved on from this, but if not the following may help. It is terminal (command line) based in the main.


You need to manage the copy from a system which is not itself a clone of the one you want to copy. Running from a live DVD or USB stick should be fine. The source drive must be passive and, as I understand things, UUIDs apply to partitions, not drives. Having two partitions on a system with identical UUIDs may cause big problems if mounting is attempted.

For backups and duplicating I use gddrescue as it gives progress information, rather than the traditional "dd", but gddrescue needs installing

Code:

sudo apt-get install gddrescue

I believe it can be installed into a running live system, given an Internet connection.

The two hard drives must be attached - could be one direct by SATA cable or connector and one via a USB caddy. Find their IDs such as /dev/sdx and /dev/sdy using "Disks" from the settings menu. Assuming /dev/sdx is the source, copy AFTER DOUBLE CHECKING THE DRIVE IDs using something like

Code:

sudo ddrescue /dev/sdx /dev/sdy a-unique-filename

Note that the command drops the "g" from gddrescue. The file will record what happened but you will see any error messages on screen anyway.

Wait a long time! Then shut down and dismantle.

In my experience that should work but other tips are to use the command

Code:

blkid

to see the UUIDs (and other partition details) and to note that if necessary /etc/fstab can be edited on the destination drive to make corrections. Indeed, this might work on your earlier copy.

Regards,
Richard.

[N4RPS]

Hello!

Two words. Redo Backup. http://www.redobackup.org

It will clone the entire drive, and allow you to transfer its contents to another drive or another PC. The only restriction is that the destination drive has to be larger than the drive that was copied.

Otherwise, you could copy the individual partitions with Clonezilla, I suppose. May work, may not - I just keep things simple with Redo...

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

[trinidad]

I'm not clear on your praxis here. Are you cloning the drive to an HDD on one machine, and then unscrewing it and expecting it to run screwed into another? If that is the case you are probably going to have lots of problems even if the machines are identical models, and UUID's are the least of them. Even if the two machines are connected together properly, you will have dependency issues after the fact, and it certainly will not save you any time. You need to establish the first machine as server, and the second as client, to even begin on the right footing for this, and you still will have a lot of Debian work ahead of you because there is no freestanding installer. If these are personal computers, for personal use, and you are inexperienced with Debian, you are far better off time-wise to use a live ISO to install LL to the second, and copy files to a USB from the first and add them to your new installation. I may be misunderstanding your praxis so apologies in advance if that is the case.

Trinidad

[arxontas]

Yes i have use the Redo Backup and it worked for me. I just had  larger hard drive and it took all .working just fine.LL 2.8

Now some time ago  just before the LL 2.8 came i had LL 2.6 and the mother board on  vostro 230  the caps are blow up .
I took the hard drive (sata) and place it on optiplex 330 .woking 100 %  Thats the pc i use  for ham-radio programs . Like jnos and more.

With windows yes it did not work from one pc to the next..
Only one OS at the drive .No dual boot here .Maybe that's why ??
Thanks for reading
arxontas

[aus9]

OP

Its not clear to me either whether the drives are of equal size. Maybe more info might be useful?  As it does affect the interesting suggestion from N4RPS.

I shall waffle on.

you can use dd command but UUID has to be changed in at least 2 files
/etc/fstab
/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Richard B has already mentioned the blkid command that most live cds can use including LL. Also you must not have any partition of drive 1 or 2 mounted so unmount them in by pressing the "eject" button in LL filemanager .....there are commands that can be used but lets keep it simple?

but why not try out LL version 3?  Is there some kind of special religion here as I am new to LL forums?  thats a joke people!  ;D

any how the dd command is...as root

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=notrunc,noerror

ref
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answ...ng_With_DD

then go into the unmounted second drive and fix up the UUID entries
you can also avoid UUID in fstab by going back to /dev/sdan structure but grub is not so friendly and expects UUID AFAIK

[N4RPS]

Hello!

Yes i have use the Redo Backup and it worked for me. I just had  larger hard drive and it took all .working just fine.LL 2.8

Super!

With windows yes it did not work from one pc to the next..
Only one OS at the drive .No dual boot here .Maybe that's why ??

Could be. I usually don't have a problem swapping SATA drives from one PC to another in either OS, but I use produkey to pull the activation key before I change it over. The new PC triggers it to check for drivers appropriate for the new box. If there's too much difference, it'll want you to activate it again...

73 DE N4RPS
Rob