I’ve got a laptop running Arch (btw), with a 128GB nvme in it. The nvme has two partitions. EFI boot, and a luks encrypted lvm.

I’ve got a 512GB nvme I want to swap in. I think I can clone the device with dd, update the uuids, expand the lvm, and drop in the 512 nvme, but my searching hasn’t given me a clear confirmation of this. Am I correct in my thought process, or am I setting myself up for disaster?

  • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    Look into pvmove. I’d take a backup with dd but try to do the actual move with pvmove. This might involve multiple steps if you can’t have both nvme’s installed at the same time. In that case I hope you have other drives.

    Edit: I think what you’re doing won’t be a disaster because you’re not writing anything to the old nvme so that data is still there. So you won’t bork anything if the new drive doesn’t work.

    • harsh3466@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      8 hours ago

      I’ll take a look at pvmove.

      I can’t have both installed. Plan is to dd the 128 nvme to a USB SSD I have, then dd the SSD to the 512 once it’s installed in the laptop. All the xloning will be done by booting a USB ISO so no drives are in active use while being cloned.

      • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        I suspect your plan might be safer and less of a pain than pvmove. I’ve just never done that before so I can’t say for sure.

        Be sure you can open and mount the USB ssd after the first dd. Also check the status of the disk size of the luks container. I’m assuming your dd’ing the encrypted partition not the data inside.

        • harsh3466@lemmy.mlOP
          3·
          7 hours ago

          Thanks. I’ll stick with dd then. You are correct, I think. I plan to dd the whole disk. The plan is:

          dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

          unless that’s the wrong idea. once the usb ssd is done I will definitely check the luks container on the ssd. Size and data availability.

          • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            5 hours ago

            I recently read that luks containers don’t actually know their size they will always adapt to the size of the entire disk (it makes shrinking them dangerous). So you should be good unless your SSD is bigger than your new nvme.

            Very curious about how this goes. It might not work but it won’t wipe the original nvme. I’d love to hear how it goes.

            • harsh3466@lemmy.mlOP
              1·
              2 hours ago

              The first clone (to the interim usb ssd) was a success! I’ll report back after installing the new nvme and cloning from the ssd to the nvme.