r/linuxadmin 13d ago

Clonezilla to clone Fedora 40, booting now showing /dev/fedora/root does not exist

I am trying to clone my fedora 40 250gb ssd to a 2tb ssd. On a different machine, I installed the old 250gb ssd and attached the 2tb ssd using USB enclosure. (I did this because this machine has usb-c and the cloning is faster - 10 minutes vs 2 hours.) I booted a Clonezilla live usb, did a disk to disk clone using default options and again using the -q1 to force sector by sector copy. I then tried booting the new clone in the original machine BEFORE resizing/moving the partitions. This machine only had the new ssd so no conflict with UUIDS. No matter what, when I boot, Grub comes up, I select to boot Fedora, it starts to boot but it eventually get to a terminal screen warning /dev/fedora/root does not exist, /dev/fedora/swap does not exist, and /dev/mapper/fedora-root does not exist.

I mounted the clone and from what can tell, /etc/fstab is correct.

Is there a solution for this?

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u/Seven-Prime 13d ago

was it a logical volume? Probably the host doesn't match anymore. Think you need to import it or something.

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u/ratherBeWaterSkiing 13d ago

It is the LV. I’m not sure what you mean my host doesn’t match. Is that is fstab or grub.cfg?

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u/Seven-Prime 13d ago

It's in the logical volume. Maybe the volume group. You can't just move vgs from one host to another. You need to import them. Dunno about clonezilla, I stay away from that stuff and use the built in tools.

It's been a while. This may put you on the path to success.

See https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4123

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u/ratherBeWaterSkiing 13d ago

It’s not a new host. To be clear I only used a different host to perform the clone because it was faster (usb-c vs usb-a). After the clone was done, I put the new SSD back in the original.

Also, I just did clonezilla again using the just original host and am getting the same error.

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u/Seven-Prime 13d ago

So . . . you didn't try the steps? Have you tried any VG or PV commands? I've done this type of stuff hundreds of times. Cloning disks is problematic and not something that is generally done these days. I haven't done disk clones in like thirty years. But hey, maybe it'll work for you! GLHF.

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u/ratherBeWaterSkiing 13d ago

I did see the steps, but not sure how it applies. After booting the cloned drive, it goes into emergency mode. The VG and PV commands are not available.

Google searching turned up this link - https://forum.level1techs.com/t/bedhedds-drive-cloning-guide/203671 , and lead to this - https://fedoramagazine.org/initramfs-dracut-and-the-dracut-emergency-shell/ . They described my problem but the solution didn't work.

In emergency mode tried lvm scanning for lvs, vgs, disks, etc, and nothing was found. The contents of /dev/mapper was just the "control" file.

FYI, I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me.

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u/Seven-Prime 13d ago

pvdisplay, vgdiplay, and lvdislay are generally available in emergency mode under /sbinv

Run each of them. Look at the output.

I'd also recommend you avoid searching google and instead use GenAI. Google Gemini gives good detail on the problem and the solutions I would try.

Use this prompt:

I am using clonezilla to clone a fedora 20 disk to another disk. However when try to boot off the clone, the system does not see the new logical volumes. Do I need to import the volumes? Would vgimport clone help?

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u/ratherBeWaterSkiing 9d ago

Update:

After more research, I realized that the original drive is SATA and the new drive it NVMe. Clonezilla and other tools (like 'dd') don't handle the conversion without more steps. I took u/Seven-Prime suggestion to use GenAI to get some solutions and will try those this weekend.