[mythtv-users] How to make mythbuntu 10.4 system disk clone bootable?

[F.B. Parker]

On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Craig Huff <huffcslists at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok.  This shouldn't be so hard, but...
>
> I have been searching with google and trying various methods with no
> success.  Can someone tell me how to do this?
>
> I had a running MythBuntu 10.04 FE that stopped booting.  I found
> (once I switched from the S-video input to the VGA input with a *real*
> monitor ;-) that the SMART system actually flagged the disk as dying.
> I added a replacement disk hanging outside the case like a drunken...,
> well you know.  Then I booted into the MythBuntu 10.04 install CD
> trial mode.  I ran Synaptics, added gparted and used that to clone the
> old disk onto the replacement.  The old and new disks are single EXT4
> partitions for the O/S and another small (about 380MB) swap partition.
>  I then used gparted to enlarge the O/S partition on the replacement
> disk to use the rest of the available space (moved from a 4.3GB disk
> to an 80GB).  I mounted the disk temporarily and browsed thru the
> clone contents and it looks ok. I unmounted it and now I'm trying to
> make it bootable but having no luck. My old notes were for grub, but I
> believe this system uses grub2.  All I'm getting are complaints about
> not finding a suitable partition.  Oddly, when I ran "grub-probe -d
> /dev/sda1" I got back "ext2", but if I run parted, it tells me it's an
> ext4 partition.  I've pretty much run out of ideas at this point.  Any
> help making this clone bootable?


I can't help you with making your current clone bootable if the old hard
disk is no longer bootable. But maybe this will help. It's worth a try, and
it should help to keep such misfortunes from happening in the future.

Clonezilla Live is a free, open-source tool that works very well for making
and restoring images of disks, including bootable restores of bootable
disks.

You can make a bootable liveusb with Clonezilla. Go to clonezilla.org and
download the clonezilla live version for your architecture and follow the
instructions for creating a bootable liveusb. Refer to

http://clonezilla.org/liveusb.php

I use a hard disk "dock" like, e.g.,

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=2785

I have one hard disk that's a repository of bootable images for my various
systems including MythTV. I boot the mythbox from the Clonezilla liveusb,
hook the drive dock with my images repository disk to it, and it's able to
restore a bootable image to a hard disk and that hard disk ends up bootable.
No messing with gparted or grub - if you image a bootable hard disk and then
restore that image to another hard disk, then that hard disk will end up
bootable.

This works very well and makes it so that if

1) my mythbox's boot hard disk dies, or

2) I tinker around with it and mess it up

I can always quickly and easily restore to a known-working system.


-Bo Parker
fbp.mythtv at gmail.com
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