Getting new hardware - can I just move the disk?

[Bo Berglund]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:51:50 +0200, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:


>> Or maybe instead just bite the bullet and do the release upgrade first. I have
>> done two recent rsync "backups" of the full system to an external drive and
>> today I made another test by rsync-ing my home dir too with all the videos (they
>> were excluded in the previous runs).
>
>Sounds possible, certainly.

So my plan failed... :(

I tried to use the Ubuntu 20 Live USB I had used to boot on the Lenovo PC in
order to boot the main eMachine server so I could use the GParted application to
make a full image of the server.
I was going to use the partition copy-paste between drives as you suggested
earlier. But...

I have a USB connected hard drive with 221GB space free and the current used
size of my Ubuntu system is now 159GB.

So I wanted to use GParted to copy the existing partitions over to the external
drive before starting the system upgrade.

But the PC completely refuses to boot off of the USB! And this is an 11 years
old PC, before any UEFI..

I have entered the PC BIOS and set the boot order to start with USB, but it does
not help, always boots back into the 18.04 system...

I tried annother boot USB I have created with version 18.04.6, but it did not
change a thing. Still boots right into the existing server.

The devices are loaded:

$ lsusb
..
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 8564:1000 Transcend Information, Inc. JetFlash <== USB
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0bc2:5030 Seagate ... GoFlex Upgrade Cable STAE104  <==
USB connected hard drive 
..

$ sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,MODEL
NAME   FSTYPE     SIZE MOUNTPOINT       MODEL
loop0  squashfs  99.3M /snap/core/11743
loop1  squashfs  99.5M /snap/core/11798
sda             465.8G                  Hitachi HDS72105
+-sda1 ext4       464G /
+-sda2              1K
+-sda5 swap       1.8G [SWAP]
sdb             465.8G                  USB 3.0 Cable
+-sdb1 ext4     465.8G /mnt/backup
sdc    iso9660    7.6G                  Transcend 8GB <== The live USB
+-sdc1 iso9660    2.3G                  
+-sdc2 vfat       2.4M         

And:

~$ df -h
Filesystem         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev               839M     0  839M   0% /dev
tmpfs              175M  9.2M  165M   6% /run
/dev/sda1          457G  159G  276G  37% /
tmpfs              871M     0  871M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs              5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs              871M     0  871M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop0         100M  100M     0 100% /snap/core/11743
/dev/sdb1          458G  214G  221G  50% /mnt/backup <== Destination drive
/dev/loop1         100M  100M     0 100% /snap/core/11798

Why does not the USB on sdc show up here?

The boot USB:s are created using Balena Etcher from downloaded Ubuntu ISO
images...

Is this the main problem here, that the USB images are not bootable?
But it does boot on the Lenovo, albeit with a lot of extra effort.

PS:
I googled more and found Rufus as a recommended application to make bootable USB
devices from ISO. So I did use it and made a new USB but the same thing happens,
it just boots my existing 18.04 system...

And this is on an old BIOS only system.
Maybe I have to burn a DVD with the ISO image and load that into this system?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden