Rocky 8.6 won't boot after attempt to clone boot drive using dd

[quitedumb]

I attempted to upgrade the boot drive on one of our production machines (system specs at bottom), going from a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB to a 990 Pro 1TB. I did this by slotting in the new drive into a spare M.2, and then booting from a Rocky 8.6 (dvd1.iso) installer, and running:

dd if=/dev/nvme2n1 of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=64K status=progress

I made sure that nvme2n1 was the 500GB original, and nvme0n1 was the new 1TB.

It was done in a couple of minutes, after which I rebooted and went into boot options. There I saw that only the 1TB was listed—the 500GB wasn’t, despite still being installed. So I booted into the 1TB and got hung up on the Supermicro splash screen, the system never loaded the OS.

I then tried uninstalling the new 1TB and only leaving in the orginal boot drive, but got the same issue: no OS loading.

Has anyone hit this snag before?

System specs:

• Motherboard: Supermicro M12SWA‑TF
• OS: Rocky 8.6
• Kernel: 4.18.0-372.9.1.el8.x86_64 x86_64
• CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX 24-Cores (25/8/2)
• GPU: GIGABYTE AERO GeForce RTX 4090 24GB GDDR6X

[iwalker]

Better to use something like clonezilla to clone your drive and restore it on another system. But you may also have to check your /etc/fstab to see if tne entries are correct.

That said, putting the old drive back in should boot fine, because nothing has changed. You cannot have both drives in at the same time if you have used dd because the disk UUID partitions match on both disks and the system won’t know which one to boot, or worse.