How do I transfer PVE installation to another drive?

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csetera

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Sep 24, 2025
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I have been learning my way around PVE on a refurbished Dell Optiplex 5050 SFF that I did the initial installation on. I have PBS installed as a VM on PVE and I'm shipping my backups off to Backblaze B2.

This has all worked very well. My only real issue is that the original 1Tb HDD in this machine is annoyingly loud. I have an extra 1Tb NVME drive, so I figured I would just clone the whole HDD over to the NVME and it would "just work". However, that has definitely not been the case. The things that I've tried thus far that have all failed:
* Rescuezilla - Disk to disk clone
* Rescuezilla - Disk -> Image -> Disk
* Clonezilla - Disk -> Image -> Disk

In all of these cases, it fails somewhere along the way. It seems to be having issues with the LVM volume, but I don't know that for sure. For rescuezilla, I was seeing this thus my reason for giving Clonezilla a try. Can anyone suggest a way to accomplish this goal short of doing a reinstall to the new drive and setting things up from backups? My primary problem with that is that I don't have backups of PVE or PBS given the way I have things setup on the machine.

Thanks for any suggestions.
Craig
 
I'd live just boot something like grml or even the PVE installer (Use CTRL+F3 for a CLI inside the installer) and use dd.
 
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Find the disk(s) via lsblk -po+FSTYPE,SERIAL,MODEL and then do something like dd if=/dev/INPUT of=/dev/OUTPUT bs=1M status=progress. Be careful here not to wipe your source/input.
 
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This finished, but did not (yet) result in a bootable PVE. I'm assuming I need to fix up /etc/fstab. Is there also going to be issues with the LVM volumes given the original device was /dev/sda and the new is /dev/nvme01?
 
I think it is working. Appears the LVM volumes did the right thing. It was an external drive that wasn't connected at the time that caused the issues.
 
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