How to clone a boot disk (ssd)?

billbillw

Member
Mar 30, 2018
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Hi,
I've been running a Proxmox server at my home for almost a year now. I originally set it up with a 128GB SSD as the boot drive and have a set of four mechanical drives in a ZFS pool for storage. I thought at the time this would offer the best setup.

I have issues of running out of space on the 128GB, so I have tried a couple times to clone the SSD to a larger drive. Every time I try, it fails to boot. At this point, I would be happy if I could even clone it to an identical size SSD just to have a backup in case of failure.

It is a pretty simple setup with just a couple of Linux containers (one to Ubuntu/Plex/etc., and another as a file server). I also have one Windows 10 VM installed (this is usually what causes the space issues).

For years I have used Acronis (booted from a USB) to clone disks, but that doesn't seem to work. I tired a few months ago to backup the original SSD, then restore to a larger 256GB drive. It failed to boot. I tried today to clone the SSD to a 500GB mechanical drive using Acronis (bootable) with both disks attached at the same time. It supposedly did sector by sector copy and it still won't boot.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to copy my Proxmox host/containers/VM to another physical disk?
 
Well, tried clonezilla. Same result. I had both disks attached to a laptop with no other drives, I told it to do direct disk to disk copy. See attached for the result.

This was copying between two m.2 SSDs, both the same 128GB size. One was installed in the laptop, the other was in an adapter connected to a SATA>USB adapter.
 

Attachments

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OK, nevermind. I'm not entirely sure why, but the old disk would boot as BIOS boot (Legacy), but when I clone it, it only boots using UEFI boot. Shrug.
 

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