swapping the disk, with the operating system, using a clone made with CLONEZILLA

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 2:15 PM, Rick Stevens <ricks at alldigital.com> wrote:
> We do need more info other than "the clone operation failed". I have
> cloned a large number of machines using Clonezilla using virgin drives
> (CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Winblows). Many had the target drives larger
> than the original. I will say that they all used fdisk-style partition
> tables, though (no GPT tables).

Yeah and it's a minor problem for the backup GPT to be in the wrong
location, that alone wouldn't cause boot to fail unless the primary
GPT were hosed somehow. The primary header points to the LBA of the
backup header, which would still be valid if you had used something
like dd or ddrescue. The problem is that if the primary header is
hosed (missing, totally corrupt or checksum fails), a tool will assume
the backup is at the end of the drive but won't find it there.

Unless that tool is the kernel. Funny enough, the kernel itself right
now doesn't fallback to the backup GPT if the primary one is corrupt.
Instead boot fails. Not cool! [1]


[1]
mishandled corruption of primary GPT table, failure to boot
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63591

-- 
Chris Murphy