TI 2010: Clone HDD without reinstalling GRUB?
Is there any possibility to clone (create and restore) a HDD without having to run grub-install on the destination disk?
I have the following scenario:
I connect a SATA-HDD from my headless Linux box to my Windows PC using a SATA-to-USB cable. In the Windows version of TI, I choose to backup this HDD (entirely, including MBR).
If I now try to restore this image to a different HDD (also connected using SATA-to-USB), the restore process finishes without errors and all partitions are correctly restored but my Linux box refuses to boot from this new HDD, writing only "GRUB" at the bootup stage.
I have setup a test environment using VirtualBox to simulate this behaviour. There I was able to use the HDD after I've repaired GRUB using grub-install.
Unfortunately, this isn't an option for my headless box.
First, I thought it has something to do with the UUID of the new HDD but my menu.lst is only refererring to /dev/sda (without unique IDs).
Maybe TI handles USB drives different than internal ones and rewrites something during restore?
Yes, I am restoring the entire disk but I haven't tried to restore the disk signature because my Windows PC locks up when trying to do so (but I will certainly try to fix this issue).
When I do a GRUB repair while the drive is still connected to the USB port (using a Linux Live CD), the drive still won't work. I guess that's because of device node not being /dev/sda when connected using USB. The only way is to connect the HDD to the first SATA port, boot a Live CD and running grub-install.
Does TI perhaps resize the partitions when restoring to a bigger HDD? If that's the case then maybe GRUB gets confused because of the changed partition table or location of the new partitions.