Has anyone ever cloned a disk with the GPT partition scheme? (social.packetloss.gg)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg to c/linux@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] adespoton@lemmy.ca 13 points 3 months ago

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@social.packetloss.gg 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

What does that have to do with any of this?

Are you just trying to start a whimsical side conversation?

[-] 4z01235@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago

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

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 12 points 3 months ago

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

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 points 3 months ago

Oooooohhh

That's why they are getting downvotes 🙂

[-] y0din@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months ago

probably the disk UUID has changed because of the path to the NVMe vs SSD. If you use partition UUID, they will be exactly the same, but the UUID of the physical disk is not cloned, as it is a identifier of the physical device and not it's content.

change it to partition UUID and it will boot.

[-] gansheim@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Definitely second this. If you're using LVM, it uses the physical UUID for the pv. You have to update that on the new drive so it knows where the vg and lvs are being mounted to.

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 3 months ago

There wasn't any LVM involved, it's AFAIK pretty rare outside of MBR installs (as GPT typically lets you have more than enough partitions).

[-] gansheim@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

LVM is actually super common. Most Linux distros default to LVM unless you do custom partitioning. It's not just about the max number of partitions supported by the table. LVM provides a TON more flexibility and ease of management of partitions.

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I haven't seen LVM in any recent Fedora (very high confidence), Debian (high confidence), or OpenSUSE (fairly confident) installations (just using the default options) on any system that's using GPT partition tables.

For RAID, I've only ever seen mdadm or ZFS (though I see LVM is an option for doing this as well per the arch wiki). Snapshotting I normally see done either at the file system level with something like rsnapshot, kopia, restic, etc or using a file system that supports snapshots like btrfs or ZFS.

If you're still using MBR and/or completely disabling EFI via the "legacy boot loader" option or similar, then yeah they will use LVM ... but I wouldn't say that's the norm.

[-] gansheim@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That's fair, I should have clarified that on most Enterprise Linux distros LVM is definitely the norm. I know Fedora switched to btrfs a few releases back and you may be right about Suse Tumbleweed but pretty sure Suse Leap uses LVM. CentOS, RHEL, Alma, etc. all still default to LVM, as the idea of keeping everything on a single partition is a bad idea and managing multiple partitions is significantly easier with LVM. More than likely that'll change when btrfs has a little more mileage on it and is trusted as "enterprise ready" but for now LVM is the way they go. MBR vs GPT and EFI vs non-EFI don't have a lot to do with it though, it's more about the ease of managing multiple partitions (or subvolumes if you're used to btrfs), as having a single partition for root, var, and home is bad idea jeans.

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 2 points 3 months ago

That's fair, I did just check my Rocky Linux install and it does indeed use LVM.

So much stuff in this space has moved to hosted/cloud I didn't think about that.

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

So I fixed this by using clonezilla (which seemed to fix things up automatically), but for my edification, how do you get the UUID of the device itself? The only UUIDs I was seeing seemingly were the partition UUIDs.

[-] y0din@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

sorry for the late reply, the command 'lsblk' can output it:

"sudo lsblk -o +uuid,name"

check "man lsblk" to see all possible combinations if needed.

there is also 'blkid' but I'm unsure whether that package is installed by default on all Linux releases, so that's why I chose 'lsblk'

if 'blkid' is installed, the syntax would be:

"sudo blkid /dev/sda1 -s UUID -o value"

glad you got it fixe, and hope this answers your question

(edit pga big thumbs and autocorrect... )

[-] y0din@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

also, remember that the old drive now share the UUID with the NVMe drive (which is why I recommended using partition UUID and not disk UUID), so you will have to create a new GPT signature on the old drive to avoid boot issues if both drives are connected at the same time during boot, otherwise you might run into boot issues or booting from the wrong drive.

[-] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

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@social.packetloss.gg 3 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago

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

[-] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 3 months ago

I did this recently, and encountered exactly the same issue. I can't say whether it's the same root cause, but it might be.

The device ID for the efi or boot partition may change, and in this case you have to make certain you hunt down every reference to it and update it. IIRC in my case it was in a config file for dracut, and I cottoned on when I upgraded the kernel and got back in the hung mode.

If you know the old blkid, do a deep search in both your efi partition as well as /etc and make sure you've changed to the new device UUIDs.

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 3 months ago

Very interesting. I wasn't finding anywhere what the device ID was. Everything was looking like it was copied over from where I was (at least noticing).

Clonezilla seems to have taken care of the necessary updates so if you do this again I'd recommend just using that. I hate that it's yet another special ISO tool to keep around on a USB thumb drive, but if I'd used that from the start several hours of my life would've been saved 😅

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 3 months ago

In my case, it was just too many technology changes from what I was used to, and simply wasn't familiar enough with. It doesn't help that every distro seems to do everything slightly differently, rather than just agreeing on a standard. The egotistical NIH may be the most frustrating thing about distro builders.

EFI and dracut are both novel to me; efi I'm starting to become more comfortable with, but dracut is new and I'm not entirely sure how it works and where it puts all of its config stuff. It's still better than systemd-boot, which was mostly a catastrophe for me; it worked fine until you wanted to draw outside of the lines a little and then you discover a mountain of spaghetti. I probably should have just stayed with grub, but I wanted snapshot booting, and grub is beginning to struggle with some of these new modalities.

Anyway, I don't want to have to rely on a custom specialized distro, and I figured out my problem in a couple of days; I only have to screw it up two or three more times and then I'll be comfortable with it :-)

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024

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