Getting new hardware - can I just move the disk?

[Bo Berglund]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2021 13:10:45 +0200, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:

>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.
>

I finally realized that USB boot on this PC will not work, no matter what I do
so I instead burned the Ubuntu Mate 20.04.3 ISO to a DVD disk and inserted that
into the DVD bay (which is present in my old server)
Then started up and entered BIOS so I could set CD as the first boot device.

Now I am watching the live system being loaded as I write this...

It takes quite a while to start from DVD.
(It seems to be busy doing some form of disk checking)

 -- a while later --

Now I can tell that it has reached the final screen, but the display is totally
clobbered so one only can guess at which colors are used. It is ripped sideways
into a pile of colorted lines.

So this does not work either...

How can I clone the 18.04.6 disk so I can go back if the release-upgrade fails?
Or for that matter move the disk to the new hardware?

Result so far:
- I have used rsync to copy the content of the system to an external drive
- Then I had to exclude video files due to the space they consume
- I also had to look at the rsync errors and exclude some directories
- And in the last run rsync complained about some files changed during copy
- I have tried in vain to make a USB thumb drive which will boot on this PC
- Then I made a DVD from the downloaded ISO and booted with that, worked.
- But still bad, the display is totally garbled and you cannot use it

So in order for a proper clone to be made the system must:
1 - Be switched off
2 - Dismantled so that the drive can be extracted
3 - The drive connected to another Linux machine 
4 - The target drive for the clone also connected on that machine
5 - Both drives unmounted
6 - Then use GParted to clone the partitions

I tried #2 but the drive is hidden in such a way that it is not enough to remove
the big side cover, one must dig a lot deeper. The drive is not visible at that
point, just the big DVD.

Sigh!


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden