Just moved from Win to Linux and settled on Endeavour Os to get a smoother introduction to Arch. Loving it so far!
After having spent a lot of time customizing and setting everything up, now I want to clone it from a Yoga Pro 7 laptop to my desktop to main it. And have a backup for later in case I mess something up irreparably
Used to clone Macs with SuperDuper! and Clonezilla/AOMEI on Win. Would like to do something similar here, with the least amount of boot issues, most stable and quality ghosting/clone, etc.
I’ve so far found Clonezilla, Redo, and Rsync as viable options. Bootable Live Clonezilla to do the cloning. Though I am uncertain if I’d have to manually construct the partitions, edit any EFI / config files, install and edit bootloader (GRUB?) paramters to make it work.
Has anything changed or is it fine to use guides or articles from 2022 for instance?
Also, I checked LTE for additional kernel fallbacks during install, in case of issues. Any points on where I can find info on how to solve kernel issues once they arrive? Figured it’d be smart to prepare for it.
Any input, pointers or tips would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
This is what many users use for disk to disk cloning.
You don’t need a bootable usb with Clonezilla. It is already in Arch repos. You could install it on your EOS live usb and use it.
If you are depending on proprietary drivers, like for nvidia etc., you may need to do some additional work to get it working on the target device.
Also, you may need to reinstall the bootloader EFI binary on the target device. grubx64.efi or systemd-bootx64.efi depending on the bootloader you are using.
PS. Look into if Clonezilla has support for the filesystem you are using, for example for Btrfs.
Much appreciated! This was very helpful. I have one more question if that’s ok.
They both run AMD iGPUs, so no GPU drivers to currently speak of (will use AMD later on).
Is it sufficient to plop the boot folder (which contains both bootx64.efi and grubx64.efi) into the root of the new system? Or do I have to mount the EFI partition and copy that over?
Using ext4
Edit: I mounted the /boot/efi partition, but nothing showed up in Dolphin On hackintosh I had to use an EFI tool. Dunno if it’s the same here.
Cloning the entire disk those boot files and folders should already be on the target disk.
The additional step would be to create an EFI boot entry in the UEFI settings of the target machine.
Depending on the UEFI implementation of the machine, this may not be needed. Some UEFIs detect the bootloader’s efi binary and create a boot path/entry for it automatically.
In the case of contrary, you would need to use you EOS live usb, mount your root and ESP partitions use arch-chroot to chroot into the system and reinstall Grub. Judging by what you mentioned above(Grub):
The way I have actully been cloning my systems is backing up my .config files and making a list of my installed packages. Works great and I have a fresh native install on each system so I don’t have to worry about something not installing.
The only downfall is it uses a lot of bandwidth and time to install everything, which isn’t that bad unless you have a lot of AUR packages that are building from source.
Got a clearer picture of how to approach now. I’ll give it a try and see how things go. Thanks for taking the time to detail your response so thoroughly.
Thanks for the reply! That seems like a solid approach.
Does the config files cover everything you’ve configured in the Os or just specific things? will it include configs for apps as well? I’m guessing .config and .local will cover most of them.
Was hoping to get some pointers.
On hackintosh I had to use an EFI tool. Dunno if it’s the same here.