Hi all,

Hope you are well. I am using Debian and have 320GB SATA disk. I decided to buy a new SSD 500GB and want to clone my current disk to the new one.

I did lots of research on the forums, IRC channels, etc. but no luck there is no enough information about this issue. All of them are saying you need partitioning the disk before, copying data with dd and resize/extend disk with starting/ending sectors. I am really confused.

My goal is clone current disk to a new one. I know installing a fresh OS and moving all data to the new OS but this is not in my options.

lsblk:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 298.1G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 953M 0 part
│ └─boot_crypt 254:3 0 951M 0 crypt /boot
├─sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
└─sda5 8:5 0 297.2G 0 part
└─sda5_crypt 254:0 0 297.1G 0 crypt
├─debian--vg-root 254:1 0 287.8G 0 lvm /
└─debian--vg-swap 254:2 0 9.3G 0 lvm [SWAP]
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom


Any help would be appreciated..

Thanks in advance.

It don't hurt to write to the new SSD, if first attempt fails, clean off the new drive's partition table and try something else. I'm not LVM experienced, but you should be able to simply dd if=/old/drive of=/new/drive bs=4k conv=notrunc from a running Linux live session. The new drive will only be 320GB like the original, remove or disable the old drive, set BIOS to boot the new drive, boot it and see if it works.

Now from either Linux live or while in the new running Debian you run fdisk /dev/<whatever> (the drive, not partitions), select "x" to go into expert mode, select "p" to print current drive structure, select "f" to fix partition order, select "p" to see what the proposed changes are, if you like what you see, select "r" to return to main menu, select "w" to write the changes. If you are doing it from the new running Debian you'll get errors because the kernel is running on the old configuration, just reboot and hopefully you have the full drive which you can now expand the LVM.

It makes no sense to clone that configuration. The extended partition, the LUKS partition, the container, the PV, the vg and the lv's will all need attention. In that order, and no mistakes.

If you have to, pre-allocate the partitions, takes that out of consideration later. Personally I would copy, not clone.

syg00 advice sounds right. I would boot off of a live usb with both source and target drives installed. Then encrypt/format/mount the target drive partitions and then open(decrypt) & mount (read only might be good) the source partitions, and then copy all of your data from source to target with rsync. Then do whatever needs to be done with your bootloader on the target drive. You are never writing to the source, so, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

rsync is often called advanced copy, for this job plain 'cp -a' will do just fine, no extra features of rsync are needed.