Hi, On Fri, Aug 07, 2026 at 11:34:53PM +0100, mick.crane wrote: > Connect the 250Gb to USB via a power supply and SATA USB connection thingy.
The use of USB bothers me. Aside from its general unreliability and lack of performance, these sorts of USB/SATA converters can change the sector size of the storage. > "dd if=/dev/disk_to_copy of=/dev/disk_to_copy_to bs=64M status=progress > conv=fsync" It's a reasonable plan and pretty safe because of course you are not at any point going to destroy your source copy. I probably wouldn't use the conv=fsync, I'd probably just run "sync" once at the end. Something you have to be careful about is the sector size of the two drives will need to match for this to have any chance of working. You can check that with: $ lsblk -o +LOG-SEC They just need to be the same. If they're not then you might need to do this at the filesystem level, e.g. with tar, rsync, cpio or similar. An issue with those tools is that it's very tricky (but not impossible) to capture everything about files, such as hard links, sparse files, extended attributes, ACLs, capabilities etc. > With the intention to use fdisk to expand the partition with the OS on it > and resize2fs to make more usable space on the partition. You haven't mentioned how this system boots. I assume not UEFI as you haven't mentioned any EFI System Partition. So if this is legacy MBR with a /boot on the partition you've cloned, most likely grub finds its kernel and initramfs by filesystem UUID. The UUID will be identical since you did a byte-identical copy of the disk, but if both SSDs remain attached then it's not guaranteed which one grub finds first. We also don't know if this is MBR partitioning or GPT. What does "fdisk -l" of the original SSD device look like? > There is an issue that the debian live OS blanks the monitor after a while. > "Ctrl+Shift" brings back the display but the 3rd time "Ctrl+Shift" didn't do > anything. > Before the last screen blanking, progress was showing 99% so I wait a while > then turn off PC. > Booting from new clone of OS disk there is kernel panic and fsck says it's a > bit messed up. > Perhaps I didn't wait long enough. It sounds like the computer locked up, which is a bad sign and I probably wouldn't have continued until that was resolved. > Perhaps Debian Live is not the best thing to use for this single purpose. > I suppose question is what's best way to ensure original disk integrity > before cloning (if that's an issue). > How in Debian live to turn off for good any screensaver, power saving > settings. It should work. > Is there any more surefire way to do this move OS to a bigger disk and have > it boot. If had used LVM, LVM commands would make it possible even online. Though mixed sector sizes can still cause issues there. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
