Won't boot after dd copy of another ubuntu system....

[taiowa]

Generally, I have great success doing a dd copy of a full drive /dev/sdX to a new computer - same or larger drive.

This config: ProLiant DL360p with P420i controller. Pre-checked this by installing live ubuntu from a stick...no trouble booting that.

Once that was done, I made a dd copy with gzip to a file on a large USB SSD. When complete, I zcat-ted that back via dd to the boot drive on the ProLiant. On boot - "non-system disk..."

Can anyone comment on whether the P420i stores stuff on the drive that I would have over-written with this process, and if so, does anyone know where and how big a chunk I should excise from the new image to get it to work?

Or - would I be better off just removing the P420i and running SATA barefoot - using the RAID drivers in Linux to make this 2-drive JBOD?

Many thanks!

[taiowa · Accepted solution]

Okay - rather simple. The source of the dd blob was from an acer nitro laptop - efi boot. The destination was this old DL360p....BIOS upgraded to latest 2019. Does not boot efi it appears. By adding a 16m partition somewhere on the drive and doing the mount --bind////  and chroot then grub-install and update-grub, and managing flags, the clone started perfectly, with all the junk that was on the laptop. 

one of these days, that will be converted to a VM after we add a few TB of storage to this thing.

Thanks for all the views, guys! Much appreciated.