Move elive from one drive to another?

Elive System Installed
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I got the latest x64 beta a few hours after it became available. Installed it right away, spent a week or so customizing it for me, then realized I had a lot of work to do in Windows and needed to dual boot for a while. Installed Win 11 after getting elive setup right. Elive still booted just fine, I just had to choose it from the BIOS boot menu. I then used Clonezilla to saveparts (save partitions individually) on the entire drive, which was really just a total of around 160GB for both Win11 AND elive.

After I got the Windows work done I realized I would do a lot better by switching the then external 6TB HDD with my then internal 2TB HDD, at the same time as ditching Windows and using elive full time only.

First I imaged both drives, then switched them around so I now have the 6TB internal and the old 2TB is connected via USB. When I use the boot menu from the BIOS, it still gives me the 2TB drive as an option, including both the elive partition as well as the Windows boot manager.

So obviously the first thing I did was install the latest x64 elive beta from USB. I'm actually using Ventoy to choose the elive iso from a list of others, and it works fine that way. That booted stock just fine, so I rebooted to Clonezilla and restored the root and home partitions only (not the 16MB boot partition.)

Obviously elive didn't like that because it was booting to a drive that it wasn't installed to. Then I tried reinstalling elive, rebooting and restoring just the home partition. When I did that and tried to login to elive after rebooting, it just went back to the login screen over and over. If I tried a different password it would tell my that was incorrect, but when I got it right, the screen went black to start x, then went back to the login screen.

Basically I'm just trying to get all my old settings (apps installed, animated wallpaper set up, custom Enlightenment desktop menu, etc.) onto the 6TB drive with as little work as possible. I really did an awesome amount of setup and I don't really know everything I customized or installed can be recreated.

I really appreciate your help, thank you.

EDIT: Just realized that I also tried restoring the parts to a separate drive (8TB,) reinstalled elive, then just copied the files from the 8TB's restored home or root partitions. Tried copying just home directory (wouldn't login,) and tried home and root directories (wouldn't boot.)

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You have an issue here that the boot sequence is looking for partition UUIDs that aren't the same anymore.
You have the options to either change those to the right ones in the new boot sequence or use the sequence that came with the backups and go from there.

In 'ye old days of yore' partitions would be(and still can be) defined by /dev/sda or hd0 or such but lately it's UUID.
There's some info here: How to find disk partition UUIDs in Linux

The easiest way would be to clone the the the partitions as a whole to the other disk and then start removing Win11 from there, after which you can resize the partitions.

My personal experience on using a very big HD is the downside that I'll require an even bigger USB disk for backups or cloning, which takes up ever more time ...... so frankly I ended up keeping my installs <1TB (even downsizing some installs) making it a lot quicker to do backups more often and not keeping too much cruft on my HD anyway. :w00t:

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Alright cool, thanks a bunch! Yes, I figured it was looking at the UUID, I just didn't know how to set that for a new disk. That gives me what I need, and I found the rest by googling how to change uuid in Linux. Pretty straightforward.

I think I'll image the drive as it sits right now (just in case,) then just copy over the partitions again and this time update the proper boot files. Probably work fine now!

I'll reply to this thread when I have an update. Thanks, triantares!

EDIT: Got busy doing other stuff, but almost ready to backup and do it! Looks like in elive I just need to update the /boot/grub/grub.cfg . What I did was just to find the uuid by running ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/ then edited my backed up copy of the /boot/grub/grub.cfg . It was super easy. What I did was just find the old Elive OS partition I had backed up and copy its uuid to the clipboard. I then went back to the text editor and found Search > Replace. I pasted in the uuid I had copied, then switched back over to the terminal window, copied the uuid of the new 6TB drive I want to use, and put that into the "Replace" field in the text editor. It found like 10 entries, so that's probably good. :smiley:

Ready to image, then copy/pasta the (edited) backup partitions. BRB!

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Got sleepy at 7am and passed out until just now.

Copied elive OS partition over, now gets past the first few lines, then wants me to login to the computer, like via command line. I know elive is supposed to login automatically then start x, but mine isn't logging in. When I set the grub.cfg to show the old uuid and boot from the external 2TB drive, that works fine. So I'm not sure how to proceed.

EDIT: Hmm... I guess the next thing I should do (unless someone says otherwise) would be to go through the grub.cfg and search for the uuid to see what changes I made. Guess I'll do that in just a minute. Please give me the solution if you know it so I don't actually have to do any research - I am an ex-Windows user. :smiley:

Hehehaha, I promise that last line was a bit of jest, aimed primarily at myself. I actually prefer to radically customize my system so that it's perfect for me, so doing a little research to fix something is a non-issue to me, just like it is for you.

I'll let everyone know here with another post if I find whatever isn't logging the system in.

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Ok, wait, what? I just went back and re-read your post, and I totally overlooked this probable easiest solution by far. But I don't get it. Just using Clonezilla to image the drive as a whole won't change anything, will it? Is that what you're telling me to do? Clone the whole drive from the old 2TB onto the now internal 6TB?

Thanks again for your help, triantares - I really appreciate the guidance.

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ACK!! IT DOES THAT!! Cool, apparently Clonezilla does just that when imaging a drive: it images the drive. A guy over on sourceforge clearly spelled it out for me:

"Clonezilla" is a tool to "clone" disk for partition for you. By cloning, it means everything will be the same. So actually it does not change the UUID of our target disk, it clones that for you.

Ok then! If I had more carefully read your reply I would have gotten this fixed yesterday. Alright then, I just need to reboot to Clonezilla, and image THE DRIVE instead of the partitions. That means I also need to fix the grub.cfg back the way it was originally, but no big - made a backup.

This is probably gonna take a minute, so I'll image the whole drive this time, reboot and prove to myself that it just worked, then expand the home partition. Cool! I'll let everyone know how it goes! Thank you one more time, @triantares - even just a sentence is sometimes what us n00bs need. 'preciate ya.

Yup! Instead of choosing device-image I just choose device-device . That'll clone my drive (including the uuid, as you originally stated.) Reboot to confirm I did it right, then reboot to expand the home partition! Easy peasy! :smiley:

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Wow, ok @triantares you are a certified genius, or should be. Myself I should simply be certified. :smiley: I used Clonezilla's disk-disk option, which just used a cloning program and it cloned the disk just like you told me it would. :smiley: I imaged the entire 2TB drive onto my now internal 6TB drive. I had to finagle the BIOS a bit and tell it about my new (sortof) boot options, but I got it to boot straight into elive without messing with boot menus. I then deleted windows partition, resized the reiserfs home partition, and rebooted again. It went right into elive, and it then showed the full 6TB drive available to my home directory.

So triantares, you definitely solved my issue in one fail swoop. Now I just need to learn more about Clonezilla, such as will savedisk when using disk-image also save the uuid in case of drive failure that needs to be replaced. Either way that's on me and I know where I'm headed. Thanks again, @triantares, you're a big help.

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Yes, it absolutely will.
Clonezilla makes a 1:1 byte for byte copy for cloning......it's 'dd' made easy. :madness:
If you've got a separate 'home' partition you could even just clone that and replace if necessary.

The only issue you might be getting is that: as your disks get bigger, so will your back-up clones.
Clonezilla does compress large files but then that will require ever more time to extract. So, all in all you'll be needing a backup medium that's larger tan your original (now 6Tb) if you want to keep multiple copies. :face_with_head_bandage:

On a side note: SSDs are notably faster to work with than HDs, another reason to not move to really large disks for daily usage.