My Experience Cloning My Replacement SSD

[nedsnow]

Hi,

I received my new SSD yesterday, and set to work on it this morning. I had some minor issues, which I'll describe here.

I "burned" the USB stick with no issues using Baleena Etcher.

I started the cloning trying to use a mini-usb keyboard that I use when I need to interact with one of my Raspberry Pis. I think the problem was that the delete key also had a back-arrow on it, so I might have been getting a backspace instead of delete. I switched to an old "real" PS2 mouse and keyboard on a PS2->USB adapter.

I still had problems getting into the BIOS. I found it easiest to let it boot into Kodi, then doing a Reboot from the menu. For me, there was too much ambiguity of when to start hitting Delete using the Power button.

For some reason that I don't understand, the new disk didn't always show up in Gparted. I had to reboot, and it then appeared.

In Gparted, on sda (the old disk), the System partition had a red triangle on it. Looking at the Info dialog, the packages dosfstools and mtools were required to manipulate FAT partitions. dosfstools was installed, but mtools wasn't. After I installed mtools, the triangle went away.

On sdb, the new disk, there was a red exclamation point, and it wouldn't let me paste. According to the Info, the disk label was invalid. I had to create a GPT partition table on the disk before it would allow access.

Once that was done, the copies succeeded without incident. I swapped the drives, plugged everything in again, and the IceBox booted normally, with all timers and recordings intact. My disk was only about 10% full, so the whole exercise only took about 1.5 hours.

I hope this helps anyone else having problems. Thanks IceTv for the replacement. That's service!

Ned

[IanL-S]

Ned

My experience was less complicated than yours.

The online instructions tells you that you have to change GPT and how to do so. [Edit: Daniel Hall says this was added to the instructions recently.]

With the source disk, I ignored the red symbol on the system partition and was able to copy and past without any manipulation (I just followed the online instructions).

The only problem I had was unrelated to the cloning process; I hoped to make a video of the cloning but for some reason the IceBox refused to work with my HDMI splitter - I have used it before but it threw a hissy fit this time. It may be due to an iffy HDMI cable.

Ian

[Daniel Hall at IceTV]

Hi Ned,

Thanks for the feedback, we have updated the documentation to include the step of creating a GPT partition table (the drives we used during testing didn't require this step, but it looks like some do).

As for the red warning symbol, the partition can still be copied even if it cannot be manipulated as per the warning.