Clone running live system not working as expected

[zephyr707]

Hi there,
I have been using MX 18 Continuum for several months off of an SD card mounted via a card reader. Seems to boot fine and I've been using the live usb w/ persistence to try out MX Linux. I just bought a larger USB thumb drive and would like to clone the current install on the SD card over to the USB and then wipe the original SD card, but I'm running into a some issues.

I tried using the MX Live Usb Maker and it seems like it is working. The program recognizes my new USB thumb drive and auto-populates it into the "select the target USB device" dropdown. I then tick off the "Clone running live system" option and leave everything else as a default and then hit the "Next" button. This runs through the operation and has a progress bar which builds up and finishes with a "LiveUSB creation successful!" message. However, upon reboot on the new device it says there is no persistence and I get a vanilla install.

Reading through the live-usb-maker log it looks like it is just cloning /live/boot-dev, which maybe is the correct behavior, but I thought it would clone everything in the system and create an identical clone. If this is not the intended use, is there an easy way to clone everything in the current live-usb setup to a new usb device?

many thanks,
Z

[dolphin_oracle]

you are correct, it only clones the linuxfs file.

so you have 3 options.

1. you could clone the drive, then copy over the rootfs and homefs from the the antiX folder on the original drive onto the new drive (I think that will work anyway).

2. my preferred method is to remaster the drive, compressing the rootfs back into the linuxfs, and then cloning that after a reboot.

3. I think you could also just do a drive copy with something like clonezilla to clone the entire drive onto the second device. I haven't tried this one.

[BitJam]

That feature has been recently added to the version in my git repo. Please give it a try and see if it now works like you expect.

Unfortunately, we won't copy the rootfs file if static persistence is in use or a homefs file it is in use. So to clone the persistence files from a running live system you will need to reboot with persistence disabled.

[zephyr707]

thank you both for your replies. Unfortunately, I'm just seeing them now. I ended up cloning the drive via the gnome disk utility (create .img -> restore .img), which I guess is similar to a dd clone. Good news is that it works!

I'm playing around with MX RemasterCC now, have not used this before, but watched one of the runwiththedolphin vids on youtube wrt to remastering antix. Unfortunately, it is telling me that there is 0 available space and I'm not quite sure what it is querying. The old SD card was 16gb and the new USB thumb drive is 256gb, so there is about 240gb of unallocated space, but there is also free space on the ext4 file system that was cloned, so not sure why it is reporting 0. I'd like to reallocate that unused/unallocated space to a bigger persistent rootfs and homefs.

I'm going to try to mount the old SD card and run remasterCC and see if that would have worked better.

many thanks,
Z

[zephyr707]

Ok, just booted back from the SD card and it exhibits the same behavior, so looks like I would have troubles remastering before cloning. I'm using persist_static if that makes a difference.

thanks in advance,
Z

[BitJam]

Again, I suggest you try using the version of live-usb-maker in my git repo. Boot with persistence disabled. Otherwise I will not try to copy the persistence file systems while they are active.

Edit: If you don't want to use the git version then you can do the clone and then manually copy over the persistence files (when they are not in use). The files are /antiX/rootfs and /antiX/homefs.

[zephyr707]

Apologies, perhaps my previous reply was confusing. I was able to clone using something similar dolphin_oracle's option #3. I read/wrote an image using gnome disk utility, and that new image on the larger USB thumb drive worked, but I was exploring the remasterCC tool and it was saying there was no space. I booted from the old SD card and used gparted to resize and allocate more space on the new USB thumb drive and that seems to work, so I will try to remaster now, perhaps I should have created a new thread for that followup question.

Next time I clone I will try to use your git repo live-usb-maker and see how that works with the persistence. For now I will leave it and proceed with a remaster as I've changed a bunch of stuff on the SD card install and I don't want to clone that anymore and prefer to use the new USB thumb drive install/clone.

thanks for you help!
Z

Again, I suggest you try using the version of live-usb-maker in my git repo. Boot with persistence disabled. Otherwise I will not try to copy the persistence file systems while they are active.

Edit: If you don't want to use the git version then you can do the clone and then manually copy over the persistence files (when they are not in use). The files are /antiX/rootfs and /antiX/homefs.