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I have a home-brew media server based on a 800MHz Intel Atom with two big LVM drives and Debian 9 on a 250GB 2.5" drive. The latter is showing bad blocks, so I am intending to replace it.

I booted from a Debian live CD and dd'd the entire 250GB disk surface onto a new WD Blue 1TB drive with dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd with the new disk connected to a USB-SATA interface. Then I fitted the drive into the media server replacing the 250GB one. The machine hangs on boot, just after printing the drive ID and before the boot loader starts. The boot loader was grub legacy. I booted from the live CD and chrooted into the clone which appeared to work fine. So I mounted the LVM volumes, and installed grub2 to the new /dev/sda which claimed to have been successful. But booting from the new HD still locks the machine up as before. I've also run update-initramfs -u -k all, grub-install, update-grub and whathaveyou as one would expect.

I then tried out this boot repair cd which also claimed success but made no difference to the result. The machine hangs early after power-up.

I was warned about not having a small /boot partition near the front of the drive, so I've created one now. No difference. I also tried leaving a 6MB gap before the first partition, aligning to 4K sectors and so on, repeating the whole grub install and boot-repair-disk attempt every time. Every time: won't boot, crashes before you can get into the BIOS screen, but boot from CD and you can chroot into it, so the data seems intact.

Retrofitting the old drive works just fine (for the moment).

This is a very simple machine, MBR msdos-style boot, no EFI, only one OS installed.

Is there a good reason the machine won't boot from a clone of an old 250GB drive made onto a 1TB drive? How does it know? The drive ID doesn't appear anywhere in /boot/grub that I can find. It's all UUIDs.

The old drive has 512B physical sectors, and then new one has 4096B ones, but it has 512B emulation, right?

Here's some of the output from the boot repair CD running against the new drive.

Drive: sda _____________________________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disklabel type: dos Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sda1 * 1,036,288 477,345,791 476,309,504 83 Linux /dev/sda2 477,347,840 1,953,525,167 1,476,177,328 5 Extended /dev/sda5 477,349,888 489,932,799 12,582,912 83 Linux /dev/sda3 12,288 1,036,287 1,024,000 83 Linux Drive: sdb _____________________________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sdb: 7.3 TiB, 8001563222016 bytes, 15628053168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disklabel type: gpt Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sdb1 1 4,294,967,295 4,294,967,295 ee GPT GUID Partition Table detected. Partition Attrs Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors System /dev/sdb1 3415,628,048,06415,628,048,031 Logical Volume Manager (LVM) partition (Linux) Attributes: R=Required, N=No Block IO, B=Legacy BIOS Bootable, +=More bits set Drive: sdc _____________________________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sdc: 2.7 TiB, 3000592982016 bytes, 5860533168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disklabel type: gpt Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sdc1 1 4,294,967,295 4,294,967,295 ee GPT GUID Partition Table detected. Partition Attrs Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors System /dev/sdc1 2,048 5,860,532,223 5,860,530,176 Logical Volume Manager (LVM) partition (Linux) Attributes: R=Required, N=No Block IO, B=Legacy BIOS Bootable, +=More bits set "blkid" output: ________________________________________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/loop0 squashfs /dev/mapper/exported-archive 4b899a61-2f1c-4cd8-bc32-ce435912ba87 ext3 /dev/mapper/exported-media 36a5370f-d49a-4da3-9bc8-fefa0d005f4f ext3 /dev/mapper/exported-photos af677e44-2a83-4aba-8b37-c38c3b07a10b ext3 /dev/mapper/exported-web 27040136-28bf-464d-9802-c20511ad661f ext3 /dev/sda1 7788ea31-5e63-4869-a80e-40c99c6128b3 ext3 /dev/sda3 6f547317-4688-435f-a69d-787bf7262f29 ext3 boot /dev/sda5 a311a5cb-4f03-4930-a028-bf87b4dd8e55 swap swap /dev/sdb1 yGbmYE-Lvk1-8lZj-0xQz-u57b-L1sV-0RjV66 LVM2_member /dev/sdc1 ShaGRu-GqRZ-4fS3-k0zp-g5x4-5Kae-uLoC9o LVM2_member /dev/sr0 2017-10-29-01-25-15-00 iso9660 Boot-Repair-Disk 32bit /dev/zram0 a9802c34-25bd-4f6f-b3e5-d75c62fe8adc swap /dev/zram1 5ea34823-7d6a-4ac5-bb49-7fa9c8bbecea swap /dev/zram2 dcc2c96c-1f33-4604-b5ac-d62964731bd4 swap /dev/zram3 0eb6d924-359e-4fed-b904-788ce185bb0a swap
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  • you may have forbidden to copy the boot sector ? (separatelly) from dd if=/dev/drivesource of=/drivedestination bs=512 count=1 Commented Feb 24, 2019 at 20:27
  • I didn't do that, but I was copying from /dev/sda to /dev/sdd so that would include the boot sector wouldn't it? I should make a few edits to make that more clear. Commented Feb 24, 2019 at 20:55
  • In fact, the first attempt I used a dump and restore pipe like a grown-up. Copying the whole surface with dd was really a final act of desperation. I'm hoping it's not a 4096B physical sector thing. I would probably be in new motherboard territory. Commented Feb 24, 2019 at 20:58
  • @NickBailey. Yes dd'ing from /dev/sda to /dev/sdd, if done correctly, should have included sector 0. What was the full dd command that you used? Commented Feb 25, 2019 at 3:35
  • @NickBailey, I would not clone from a drive with 512 byte sectors to a drive with 4096 byte sectors. Even if it might work, it would not perform as well as it would with the correct sector size. I suggest that you 1. have good backups of all 'own' files and tweaks and then 2. Create a partition table and let the installer make a fresh installation. Make sure it will use correct 4096 byte sectors, and finally 3. copy your 'own' files to where you want them and install the server tools that you need. Commented Feb 25, 2019 at 9:13

1 Answer 1

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Prelim

I assume youve backed up — redundancy proportional to the value of the data!
dd​s as well as tarballs

So… You did a full-device dd uh…uh.
Double that for badblock source disk. And again for quite different source and target disk architectures

Following are slight improvements (for completeness only) I dont really expect real benefits. What I recommend is below these

Partition dds

Manually partition the new disk; dd each partition individually

Partition copys

Manually partition the new disk; mkfs; high level copy the file system. cp -a has given me trouble where tar c... source|tar x... target has worked

But I assume you've tried the above and its not worked. So…

Does the new disk work?

To try just install a fresh new debian on the new disk. Does it work?

If no the of course we are dealing with a completely different problem

Assuming yes then

Side-by-side

[For simplicity I am assuming you avoid the LV stuff]

  • When installing the new OS (above) manually partition and choose for two root systems — one for current (new) installation one for (copy of) your old. Lets LABEL them DebCurrent DebOld
  • Proceed with new install into DebCurrent
  • Copy over old disk root to Debold
  • Re-point /etc/fstab of Debold
  • [Assuming the DebCurrent boots]
  • At the time of booting
    • Enter grub prompt
    • Open up the working stanza for DebCurrent
    • Hand edit to point to DebOld; Try to boot

But… (I'm guessing) the problem is still there. And its a

Hardware Mismatch Issue

Maybe the problem is that

  • Motherboard is old (MBR-BIOS)
  • Disk is new — prefers gpt

IOW the default is:

old: BIOS-MB + MBR-disk new: EFI-MB + gpt-disk

No possibility of mix-n-match, ie in the windows world this is not solvable without shelling out more bucks for a new EFI MB.

However in the linux world you can use a gpt disk with a bios-MB The key thing there is that you need to create a BBP — a tiny 1MB special bios boot partition near the beginning of the disk.

You can do that with parted though Id recommend all gpt things to be done with gdisk

Added later

Making the bbp

I strongly recommend that for gpt disks the actual partitioning be done with gdisk. This keeps alignment well. Thereafter marking the type as BBP may be easier with (g)parted. Note the parted and gdisk links above

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  • Thanks, Rusi! Yes, sorry to mention dd-ing disks in stack overflow ;) Asreply above, I tried to behave like a grown-up at first and did a dump restore into fresh partitions then grub at first. I don't understand how the disk "prefers" gpt? Does the BBP have to be an actual partition or can it be empty space? I left 6MB before part-1 having aligned them to 4K in case that was it (using gparted on a laptop with a USB-SATA interface). I can chroot into the new hd by booting from CD and hot plugging: the disk works. Will test on a machine at work and report. Maybe old MB won't talk SATA-3 (?) Commented Feb 25, 2019 at 10:41
  • dd: Whatever works!!! BBP: Added clarification in reply. Yes it must be made and marked as such because that tells grub "you are free to mess around in here" Commented Feb 25, 2019 at 10:49
  • «Old MB wont talk SATA-3»: Easy enough to verify (without multiplying variables) by: Fresh-install on Old MB+New Disk. Dont you think? Commented Feb 25, 2019 at 10:57
  • Sure. If I do it at work it'll look like I'm working ;) I'll do a bit more testing and report back. Thanks for the comprehensive answer and the heads up on the gpt. Hoping it doesn't have to be partition 1, but p3 /boot is already before P1 so it needs a tidy up anyway. Commented Feb 25, 2019 at 11:28
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    Remember "dpkg --get-selections" to speed up making a new install replica of old. And thanks the accept even tho not exactly the solution Commented Feb 26, 2019 at 16:14

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