[SOLVED] HDD passthrough and cloning

[HandyDutchGuy]

Hello all,

I've been running Proxmox VE for some time at home and successfully created a (Sophos) firewall VM and a (Debian / Samba) file server.

I have a SSD for Proxmox and the VM's, but the two HDD's used for the file server are in passthrough mode.

I was able to clone VM's previously through the GUI, but that is no longer the case. It fails immediately:

Error
unable to parse volume ID '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD30EZRZ-00Z5HB0-WD_WCC4N0XFJ26C' (500)

I realize it's referencing the drive's ID and that that ID will differ depending on what drive is associated with the VM.

So, my question is, what am I possibly missing that a simple clone no longer works?

Thanks in advance for your input.

 

[HandyDutchGuy]

Ok, looks like I figured it out. It's a bit of work, but not bad at all. The scary part is that I had to detach the (two storage) drives first. I had hoped that "detach" would have an "attach" counterpart, but that's not the case. Nothing new to (most) of you, I'm sure. So - detach the drives. Cloning works beautifully.
Then after the cloning, simply add the drives back to the VM as per hard drive passthrough instructions (I have the instructions that worked for me at hand...)
After that is done, the clone looks identical in all aspects to the original and what's more, it works just the same.

Glad that one is figured out.

Mmm..... perhaps, for other not-so-experienced users like myself, this little fact could be included in the how-to for cloning a VM, when hard drives are used for the VM in passthrough mode.