[mythtv-users] new drive

[Ram Ramesh]

On 11/22/22 21:29, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Nov 2022 13:48:25 -0500, you wrote:
>
>> After more than ten years of mild use my initial storage drive is failing,
>> which prevents the system from auto-starting when it needs repair. The
>> replacement will arrive shortly, the failing drive has the boot record,
>> recordings, banners, db backups, etc., no operating system. Should I clone
>> it? use dd, or gparted? If the UUID is different, then fstab will need
>> modification too. Is there an elegant way to do this?  TIA  Daryl
> If I want to copy a complete drive (or do image backups), I use
> Clonezilla booted from a Ventoy USB stick:
>
> Ventoy:
> https://www.ventoy.net
>
> Clonezilla:
> https://clonezilla.org
>
> So just create a Ventoy USB stick, and then download the Clonezilla
> .iso image and put it on the USB stick.  If you are using a recent
> version of Ubuntu, it is best to use the "alternative stable" Ubuntu
> based version of Clonezilla.  Boot using the USB stick and tell
> Clonezilla to copy the old disk to the new one.  I usually also have a
> bootable live Ubuntu image on my Ventoy USB stick, so I can then boot
> to that and use gparted to re-arrange the partitions on the new drive
> (as it is usually much bigger than the old one).
>
> I normally use partition labels (LABEL= instead of UUID=) in fstab, so
> copying the old drive keeps those labels the same and I do not need to
> change fstab.  But if you do need to edit fstab, just boot a live
> Ubuntu from your Ventoy stick and manually mount the new drive, then
> go to fstab and edit it.  It is actually possible to use the command
> line option on a Clonezilla boot in the same way, but you may find
> that the tools you want to use (eg your preferred editor program) will
> not be available.  So I usually use a live Ubuntu where I can just do
> "apt install" to get any tool I might find missing.
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As long as the new drive is as big as the old drive, you can create 
(empty) partitions of the same (or bigger) size on the new disk and "dd" 
each partition from old drive to new drive. This will keep everything 
intact including UUID. I have copied UEFI boot disk this way and the 
copy works exactly as the original. The only caution is that you cannot 
put both drives in the same machine as there will be duplication of all 
sorts of data/meta-data between the two disks.

This worked even for windows C drive. However, you sometimes have to 
reactivate depending up on what other hardware you changed.

If you are moving from smaller to larger disk, you can create larger 
partitions on the new disk, dd the smaller to larger partitions, boot up 
the new system and grow each filesystem as needed.

I find this method to be the easiest. However, one needs to be careful 
and not make mistakes.

Regards
Ramesh