New hard drive cloning boot fail

[agkbill]

Dear bubba users,

I just wanted to share my experiences from attempts to clone the hard drive in my bubba2 when I was to upgrade from 1 TB to 2 TB disks, both WD green disks.

The idea was to clone the whole disk and then use gparted to expand the partition to the whole size of my new 2 TB disk.

My first attempt was with clonezilla, using ubuntu (GNU/Linux). I used verbose to make sure everything went OK. It took in total 48 h, 24 h cloning and 24 h check.

It did not work, bubba2 did not boot with the new 2 TB disk.

Well I did not gave up. Tried to clone with G4L (Gost for Linux).

Using:

- RAW mode, this should clone the disk bit by bit.
- click'n'clone.

G4L was much faster the Clonezilla, it took maybe 9 - 10 h to clone.
But did not work as well. Bubba2 did not boot with the new 2 TB disk.

So I put the original 1 TB disk back.

Now this one did not work! Phuuuu, not easy.

Luckily I was running with Raid, so I could just reinstall from USB stick and then recover.

That how I finally did.

Copy everything in the /home folder to a new disk.
Installed from USB stick on my new 2 TB disk and then copy back all data.

I was thinking about cloning only the /home partition, but I had used Raid so not possible. Further on the new installation on the 2 TB disk I could not access the home partition.

So lesson learned for me:

Always install bubba GNU/Linux operation system with the USB stick.
Copy files, in that way you can see what you have and got.

I will not use Raid again, even thou recovery worked fine. The problem is that I can not reach the files easy. I must get it all back in the bubba. I can not put the disk into another GNU/Linux computer and think that I will be able to copy files.
I will use the second 2 TB disk with rsync. In that way I get everything easily accessible from any computer. Bubbas backup function do not copy the files, it probably compress them and store in that way. Not as easy to recover.

Well, this was my experience from attempts to clone a whole bubba disk.

Now my bubba2 is up and running with the new disks. everything fine.


All the best!
/Christer

[RandomUsername]

I used partimage to copy my system partition and had a similar problem with regard to the B2 failing to boot (even though the target disk came out of a B3). Did a fresh install of the OS on the disk then did the cloning and it all worked fine except all my mysql databases are corrupt (not a big deal for me, I can recreate them, it was just unexpected).

[johannes]

Just a comment on the backup feature, it is possible to recover the data quite easilly from target if Bubba breaks down: All full backups contain a gzipped snapshot. Just make sure to keep full backups and not only run differential.