EFI support in the kernel

[Volker Wysk]

Am Sonntag, den 26.01.2020, 09:00 -0500 schrieb Ken D'Ambrosio:
> On 2020-01-26 08:44, Volker Wysk wrote:
> > The problem is, I have a new computer, which runs UEFI. My old one
> > is
> > BIOS/non-UEFI. Now I have to migrate my system.
> > 
> > I want to avoid to install and configure everything again, from
> > scratch, because there are many things which I've installed, which
> > you
> > can't install easily with apt. Such as my Wiki, my Nextcloud, my
> > Dovecot mail server...
> 
> Ah, now I understand your problem.  What I would try next time (or, 
> maybe, this time?) is:
> * Install the OS on your new system
> * Boot that system with boot media of some sort
> * Mount your root partition
> * Delete everything in it EXCEPT:
>   - /boot/ hierarchy
>   - /var/lib/modules/ hierarchy
>   - /etc/fstab
> * Copy everything from your old machine to the new one (but not 
> overwriting /boot/, /var/lib/modules/ or /etc/fstab -- maybe move
> them 
> somewhere safe during copying, then delete the directories from the
> old 
> system, and replace them with the backed-up ones)
> * Reboot, and see what happens!
> 
> That just might do the trick.

It's not that simple - full system encryption is part of the equation.
And with this comes LVM, which is needed when encrypting (the way the
Ubuntu installer installs it).

I mostly know how to do it. After booting from my maintenance USB
stick, I call "cryptsetup luksOpen ..." to set up (de)encryption of my
main partition. After that "vgchange -a y", to activate the volume
group. Then I can mount the root filesystem from /dev/mapper/ubuntu
--vg-root. 

A potential problem is the volume group name, which always gets set to
"ubuntu-vg" by the installer. You can't have two volume groups with the
same name. Meaning, that the volume group of my old system needs to be
renamed with vgrename *before* installing the new system. I haven't
done this yet.

I'll try it the way you've proposed. It would be great if this worked!

Bye!
Volker