I'm trying to copy root and home to other partitions on my notebook internal drive and then boot from them (root2 and home2).
Once it works, it can be an (almost) live backup or I could upgrade from Kubuntu Trusty to Utopic on the new partitions and smooth out any wrinkles while still having Trusty working in the other partitions so I can continue to get things done.
I copied home too because I don't want to have to deal with things like config file changes in Utopic which might screw up Trusty when I boot back into it.
(I had some fun with that on my other notebook when I upgraded from Oneiric to Precise using a separate partition for root, but just one home. Some things went a bit bonkers.)
It didn't quite work, so I must have missed something.
Here's what I did:
Used gparted to reformat /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda7 as ext4 (which should have cleared out what was on them) and labeled them as root2 and home2 again.
Stopped user tasks that modify files like bittorrent. (But I didn't boot from a live CD, etc.. I made the copies on the running system.)
Used rsync to copy everything with permissions, etc. preserved from root (/dev/sda3) to root2 (/dev/sda5) and from home (/dev/sda6) to home2 (/dev/sda7). (sda3 and sda5 are both the same size as are sda6 and sda7.)
I don't think it makes a difference, but sda3 is labeled "root", sda5 is labeled "root2", sda6 is labeled "home" and sda7 is labeled "home2".
Mounted /dev/sda5 on /media/bigbird/root2
Edited /media/bigbird/root2/etc/fstab and changed the uuids for root and home to the ones for /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda7. (Got them by running ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid and copy and pasting them.)
Ran grub-customizer which updated the boot menu to show the new OS on /dev/sda5.
Thought I was done and rebooted, selecting the OS on /dev/sda5 on the grub2 menu.
Boot looked fine, but when I ran df, it showed root as /dev/sda3 and home as /dev/sda6 - like nothing had changed.
Mounted /dev/sda5 again and verified that my changes to fstab were still there. They were.
Noticed that /etc/fstab~ was left over from the editing and deleted it.
Tried to get online, but couldn't. My wifi said it was connected, but there was a second instance of the connection available that should not have been there. Tried to connect to that, which appeared to work, but I still couldn't get online.
Rebooted into my original partition (/dev/sda3) - which still works fine and has no problem coming online.
Apparently, I've missed some steps needed to make this work.
Also, I seem to have made my router unhappy because it wouldn't let me connect to the Internet when I booted the new way. I didn't try to just login to the router.
It did seem a little too simple just to copy everything, change fstab, grub, and reboot.
What do I need to do to get this to work?
EDIT:
I have included my fstabs and some other stuff showing what the UUIDs are below.
What looks like the immediate problem is that grub.cfg is messed up on both partitions.
In the first code block below is a snip of it which shows the schizophrenic entry for sda5 with the root partition set correctly, but with the boot image set to use the one on sda3. (Other entries have the same problem.) It may have other errors. I'm not familiar with it enough to know. (FYI: the kernel versions on sda5 are a little old because I have done updates on sda3 since copying it and haven't run the rsyncs again yet.)
I just looked at the grub entry again and I can't see how it worked at all! It looks like it's looking for kernel 46 on sda3 - which doesn't exist. That older kernel is only on sda5 because I haven't run the rsyncs again yet.
This could be something caused by grub-customizer. I don't know. It probably needs to be fixed before looking for other problems.
Since this file is generated, I need to fix it indirectly, but I don't know how to do it.
/boot/grub/grub.cfg snipped:
### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober_proxy ###
menuentry "Kubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (14.04) (on /dev/sda5) Testing/backup" --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option '$
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='hd0,msdos5'
if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos5 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos5 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos5 2540779$
else
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 2540779b-43d7-4e38-a227-68057afceb47
fi
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-46-generic root=UUID=9aae2d22-4393-436a-a505-130db27e0e55 ro quiet splash $vt_handoff
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.13.0-46-generic
}
fstabs and UUID info:
sda3 (current working root partition)
bigbird@ramdass:/etc$ cat fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=9aae2d22-4393-436a-a505-130db27e0e55 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=1be3e600-6582-4fe6-a8bc-b5479f1444b1 /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=3d9fe1af-25fe-4d28-82c9-5c2b4d895b79 none swap sw 0 0
bigbird@ramdass:/etc$
sda5 (copy of sda3 to be used as a fall back if the upgrade goes south, etc.)
bigbird@ramdass:/media$ sudo mount /dev/sda5 /media/work
bigbird@ramdass:/media$ cd work
bigbird@ramdass:/media/work$ ls
bin C:\nppdf32Log\debuglog.txt dev initrd.img lib libnss3.so opt run srv var vmlinuz.old
boot Desktop etc initrd.img.old lib64 lost+found root sbin usr vmlinuz
bigbird@ramdass:/media/work$ cd etc
bigbird@ramdass:/media/work/etc$ cat fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
##JJP Modified for root2 and home2
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / is on /dev/sda5 (root2)
UUID=2540779b-43d7-4e38-a227-68057afceb47 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home is on /dev/sda7 (home2)
UUID=8e3aca35-c376-4a71-b6be-5c3c063a184b /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=3d9fe1af-25fe-4d28-82c9-5c2b4d895b79 none swap sw 0 0
bigbird@ramdass:/media/work/etc$
bigbird@ramdass:/media/work/etc$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Apr 9 03:53 0A1258CF1258C0FD -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Apr 9 03:53 180E32C60E329CA6 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Apr 9 03:53 1be3e600-6582-4fe6-a8bc-b5479f1444b1 -> ../../sda6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Apr 9 03:53 2540779b-43d7-4e38-a227-68057afceb47 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Apr 9 03:53 3d9fe1af-25fe-4d28-82c9-5c2b4d895b79 -> ../../sda8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Apr 9 03:53 8e3aca35-c376-4a71-b6be-5c3c063a184b -> ../../sda7
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Apr 9 03:53 9aae2d22-4393-436a-a505-130db27e0e55 -> ../../sda3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Apr 9 03:53 accbe348-0237-436f-b1b8-c642b95ec49c -> ../../sda10
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Apr 9 03:53 b8f4a41f-5056-4b06-a190-14f9f1ea0244 -> ../../sda9
bigbird@ramdass:/media/work/etc$
