Linux – Cloning an LVM disk with dd

disk-imagelinuxlvm

I would like to clone a smaller LVM-formatted disk onto a larger one using dd, and boot that disk in the same machine. Do I need to make any special considerations for LVM?

Thanks! Although I considered the cool on-the-fly migration, where a second drive is added to an LVM volume and then LVM is told to remove the original drive from the volume, I decided my system would be much more likely to boot (and fully backed up, on the original disk) if I simply cloned the disk with dd, moved the new drive over to the first channel, removed the old drive, booted, added another partition in the new free space, added that partition to the original, smaller LVM volume, and used resize2fs to make the new space available to the filesystem. This worked great.

Best Answer

If a block for block copy, no. You'd later extend the volumes using the unused space.

Related Solutions

Disk Image – How to Use DD for Disk Cloning

dd is most certainly the best cloning tool, it will create a 100% replica simply by using the following command. I've never once had any problems with it.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M

Be aware that while cloning every byte, you should not use this on a drive or partition that is being used. Especially applications like databases can't cope with this very well and you might end up with corrupted data.

Windows – Missing hal.dll After Disk Clone

(I'm asking/answering this because I thought it might be helpful to others.)

The problem was the boot.ini.

I copied the recovery partition (which was at the end of the drive) first because I wanted to copy and resize the system partition in one step. I figured that it would be faster than having GParted copy the system partition, then copy the recovery partition, then resize the system partition to fill the space.

Because of this order the partition numbering was different that the original. The first partition (at the beginning of the drive) was number 2, and the partition at the end of the drive was number 1.

The boot.ini simply had to be updated to reflect that. From:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Window"

To:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Window"

Hopefully that helps anyone else in the same situation. Next time I might just use dd, then gparted to grow the partition. Really not sure what would be fastest.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Disk Image – How to Use DD for Disk Cloning

Windows – Missing hal.dll After Disk Clone

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