SOLVED Transferring mint to another disk

[phals]

As a relatively new user of mint and linux ingenal I am always nervous of doing anything which will give "grub" a fit. There are many posts about my topic but my current set-up is a little unusual and i would like to be sure I go about things the correct way.

My systen has a recent high-end motherboard, AMD components and 5 ssds one of which is MVNE:

The MVNE has my daily operating system of Mint 20.3 used until Vanessa was released.
One ssd has Windows 10.
One ssd has my current daily operating system using Vanessa. I did a clean install and then added data from 20.3.

Two ssds are media storage. Both are accessible from either mint disk but not bootable

The Vanessa disk is now stable and running very well and i would like to move its contents intact to the NVME (which is larger and faster) eliminating the 20.3 version.

Grub includes both Mint disks and Windows. There are Macrium Relect disk images of all three.

Any suggestions to how best to proceed would be much appreciated.

[Kris345]

Yes, grub loves to throw a hissy-fit.

My thought would be to image everything (Macrium), Install Vanessa stock (but don't bother to customize it) onto the NVME-20.3 partition(keep it the same size, probably), reboot and check, and then restore the image of Vanessa from the SSD onto the now-NVME-Vanessa partition. Assuming the target partition size is greater I would hope that Macrium would behave. My thought would be to leave the tiny partitions at the front of the NVME alone so that they will remain pointed to the 20.3/nowVanessa partition. This test might take 30 minutes - looking at a simple test that could be easily proofed - if it survives, fine, if not, simply restore a couple images and look for another way. I assume all are UEFI/GPT. I suppose it would work if all are BIOS/MBR. If mixed, probably not.

Since you have a mixed system, grub-wise, now, I wouldn't expect that to be a problem, BUT I suppose it could be if the partition on the NVME changes from grub .4 to .6 or whatever it is(when you go to Vanessa), but my hope would be that the 2 little partitions on the front of the NVME would have been changed by the install of Vanessa into the now-20.3 partition, which is why I wanted you to do it that way.

My belief in this is that as long as you have everything Macrium imaged, you can recover if it doesn't boot. I do a lot of changes that way, but I only have one bootable drive (an NVME), and one or more non-bootable SSDs or whatever attached.

(I am currently running Vanessa and win11 grub dual boot. When I decided to try Vanessa I imaged (Macrium), and had it install right into the 20.3 partition and kept customizing it until I was sure it would work, and done. I did also later try Ubuntu 22.04.1 onto a 9th partition but that did not work out so I restored my image of just the 8 partitions and told Macrium to delete the 9th one.

Grub cannot deal with re-numbering partitions, so in my case, partitions 1-6 inclusive are sacrosanct(boot, recover, win, recover2, NTFS), 7 is swap and 8 is (now) Vanessa). If I delete, say, partition 5, Grub will not be able to boot. It relies on fixed partition numbers, as does /etc/fstab.

I have not had good success relying on booting to things like disk-recover, or whatever, to repair things - they generally don't, for me.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

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[phals]

Thanks for the quick reply Kris. I will test as you suggest and let you know the result. I did try just cloning the Vanessa drive onto the NVME using Reflect, but that did foul up grub and i had to restore. Macrium may not have a Linux version but they have provided some lifesavers for a Linux tyro like me.

[Kris345]

Yes, I frequently use the standalone Macrium on a stick.

[AndyMH]

Or use a native linux cloning utility, foxclone. Download foxclone from https://www.foxclone.org/ not the main site (having problems). A recent system - use the edge edition of the iso. Read the section in the user guide on cloning.

[antikythera]

I'll vouch for foxclone. I have used it to transfer LMDE from SSD to nvme and also one system's ssd to a completely different machine (only opensource drivers installed on the source machine).

[phals]

Thanks for your comments everyone. The Macrium backups are bit perfect copies, but when I tried Kris345's suggestion grub did not like it.

When I did the complete clone of the Vanessa ssd onto the NVME (which then had a new fully functional Vanessa new install), a reboot put me in the bash edit screen from which I did not know how to proceed. The Vanessa ssd was then unbootable. Going back to square one and only cloning all partitons except boot ( in other words leaving the grub from a new install of Vanessa) did not work either and also put me into bash edit.

After doing more research on this forum, which I should have done before touching Vanessa in the first place, it seems the last grub created rules. By cloning the way I did I created a partition confusion I was not competent to solve. I should have copid all my important data from the Vanessa drive to a USB then taken that drive from the system, installed Vanesa from a live usb to the NVME and reistalled my important data. I can do that know as I was able (somehow) to retore the original 20.3 onto the NVME from Macrium, boot into it and using "grub customize" get grub to point to the Vanessa ssd and then boot into it. That will not get me all the sttings and tweeks i put into Vanessa but perhaps I was trying to do too much in the first place.

Unless someone see a problem with this plan I will wipe the Vanessa ssd clean after extracting my data and before starting a new install on the NVME. Will grub have written anything into BIOS itself at this point which would trip me up or is grub only present in linux partitions?

[Kris345]

No idea.
Give it a try.
Just image everything first so you can go back!
Good luck and let us know!
Be well!

[Kris345]

sorry, missed this
"Will grub have written anything into BIOS itself at this point which would trip me up or is grub only present in linux partitions?"
It's my understanding that BIOS simply points to a partition, and the MBR or GPT info on that pariition points it to the CHR (cylinder/head/record) on that partition which is the one you want. I had hoped that if you installed Vanessa on top of the NVME's 20.3 partition and rebooted to it a few times, that the GPT (and boot partitions) would have been set correctly and you could just set Vanessa down on top of it and it would go, because boot goes to /boot/grub and boot/grub has all the info for that particular image.
Win would be different in that you have to restore both the boot and the win partitions to get it to work and I doubt that would work on different devices.
Note, if you dual boot, there is pobably a boot partition on that NVME, though there may not be since your win is on another device, but if there is, that would also need to be changed, but would have been changed by rebooting the new install of Vanessa.

iow grub doesn't set BIOS - it simply makes available the partition that BIOS is pointing to.

[AndyMH]

One ssd has my current daily operating system using Vanessa. I did a clean install and then added data from 20.3.

The Vanessa disk is now stable and running very well and i would like to move its contents intact to the NVME (which is larger and faster) eliminating the 20.3 version.

Simply clone the SSD to the nvme drive, then shutdown, remove the SSD source drive and reboot. It should boot normally from the nvme drive. You cannot have the clone and original drive in the system when you boot. You have two drives with identical partitions with identical UUIDs, this will confuse BIOS. Read the user guide for foxclone, this is all explained.

[antikythera]

Simply clone the SSD to the nvme drive, then shutdown, remove the SSD source drive and reboot. It should boot normally from the nvme drive. You cannot have the clone and original drive in the system when you boot. You have two drives with identical partitions with identical UUIDs, this will confuse BIOS. Read the user guide for foxclone, this is all explained.

Yes and if it still won't boot, use the Mint live media to run boot repair tool which is on it

[phals]

Thanks for all the input. Since I needed the operating system urgently and had everthing backed up in safe locations, I went ahead as mentioned in my previous post. Everthing went very fast (on the NVME) and the system has been almost totally reconstructed without issues. I only have a VM left waiting patiently for me to reinstall Virtualbox. At the time of Mint 22 I will probabley want to do the same testing procedure, Thanks to you, I now have the knowledge to do it the easy way.

Please regard this issue as CLOSED.

Thanks again, I should have joined the forum long ago!

[Kris345]

Great!
(if you wish, edit your first post and add (solved) in front of the title.)