Macrium cloning Linux disc

[GrahamPlatt]

So, having used Macrium reflect conscientiously for scheduled backup images, on the laptop, I recently had the need to actually clone a disk. Not done that before. And it’s a Linux disk. Well, Macrium will do that; it only has to run under Windows. It is uncaring as to what it clones; a disk is a disc.

The background is that my Mintbox is getting a bit long in long in the tooth (it’s coming up 6 years old) and following the latest update (20.2, Uma) it seems to have slowed down significantly. It was continually running the Folding@Home client, which was bogging it down, but now that Deep Mind seems to have sorted the protein folding problem, I felt no shame in erasing that. Still.. it’s not regained its original sharpness. OK. The MintBox has no fan, it so runs almost silently. At the time of purchase I accepted the argument that they’d used a (500gb) 5400rpm (instead of 7200rpm) HDD to reduce heating. That no longer washes now; I’ll put an SDD in.

Well, I happen to have a 1TB “hybrid” drive going spare. Not a full-fat SSD, but it’s a good drive & it’s available right now. So to be on the safe side I image the Mintbox drive ... 6 hours, and then the Hybrid... 8 hours 30: I should just have gone to the shop! Then I start the clone. Three and a half hours later I’m informed it’s successful. Hurrah. So I put the Hybrid into the MintBox and switch on... intramfs: superblock reports 121093750 blocks. The physical size of the disk is 121093632 blocks. Something is corrupted. Manual fsck on /dev/sda1 recommended.

Take the Hybrid back out and install in caddy. ffsck later, reinstall in t’Box. “intramfs: superblock reports 121093750 blocks. The physical size of the disk is 121093632 blocks. Something is corrupted.” What? Again?

Lots of head scratching and cursing. Then I find a ten-year old discussion on linuxquestions addressing this very point.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... on-298175/

So I sudo resize2fs -f /dev/sdb1 121093632

It works!

Dealing with the other half of the disk was easy.
Sharpness re-established.
I wonder what it’d be like if I put a real SSD in?

[xeny]

6 hours to clone a 500GB drive would make me look very closely at any SMART reporting tools available to me - that feels far too slow, hinting at a failing drive.

[GrahamPlatt]

6 hours to clone a 500GB drive would make me look very closely at any SMART reporting tools available to me - that feels far too slow, hinting at a failing drive.

Sorry, misspoke there. What I did was copied (as in copy & pasted) the data folders and files to a much larger (5tb) backup drive. I then also imaged those drives. Can’t be too careful!