Hello
I have run out of space on my Rocky 8.8 desktop portable so I want to add a terrabyte P2 stick. In my portable I have 3 P2 sticks slots that are already filled. I want to replace one 256GB stick with a 1TB.
The sticks are formatted as a LVM volume in XFS for the most part
As I have no talent for fiddling around with complex partitioning issues, I thought I could “dump” the whole machine as a backup onto an external 2TB disk, wipe the 3 sticks while replacing the 256GB for a 1TB and restore the backup to the same point.
But my experience tells me that it is not that simple.
Is there a method for doing this? I am particularly struggling with how to restore the backup. I presume I cannot do it directly at BIOS level, therefore, I presume I need to start the machine off a Rocky OS on a USB stick.
Any ideas are most welcome.
Probably easier is use something like CloneZilla to clone the disk/stick you want to replace, and restore that to the new disk/stick. That way, all the LVM partition signatures, etc should remain the same meaning it will just reboot. If CloneZilla doesn’t extend the partition during restore, you can then extend it manually using growpart from the cloud-utils-growpart package.
Thank you Ian for your suggestion.
I tried Clonezilla but was unable to get the machine to reboot properly after the restore. So I have rebuilt the machine. It maybe the case that Clonezilla does not work if the volumes are not exactly the same size.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/104kffh/clonezilla_restore_does_not_work_for_a_rocky/?rdt=42767
Ubuntu has an internal cloning tool which has proved very useful to me. Maybe rocky consider one.
Thanks again
I don’t buy that, but I don’t use Clonezilla so I might be overly optimistic.
I do know that GParted (which does not “clone”) does not support LVM2 at all.
You do have three physical drives, three PV in them, one VG spanning all three, and LVs in the VG (of which the “home” likely uses extents from all three PVs). Furthermore, the “home” is unshrinkable XFS?
If one could connect fourth drive, then one could create one more PV there, add to the VG, pvmove extents from other PV, and finally remove the empty PV from VG (and drive from system). That would be “LVM way”.
A drive has partition table and at least one partition. Cloning whole disk ought to replicate both that metadata and whatever is within the partition (including UUID’s, etc). It is obvious that one cannot copy all bits into smaller disk, but going to clearly larger disk should not be an issue. Result of clone&replace should have looked like the “identical to old”, unless something was not copied – outsiders refer to identifiers that did not clone.
Anyway, if your LV spans multiple sticks, then you have even more reason to maintain a backup of the contents.
I tried all the options I could find. It seems that one cannot restore Clonezilla images that are spanned to a single disk that is big enough to copy of the data. The screen captures attached were examples of the restore errors I encountered. I would not suggest anyone use Clonezilla unless they are sure that Clonezilla works with their setup.
