migrate-fedora-27-from-ssd-to-nvme.md

Migrate a Fedora 27 installation to a NVMe SSD drive with rsync

Prepare partitions

Create partitions with GParted:

Device	Label	File system	Flag
/dev/nvme01p1	fedora-nvme-root	ext4	n\a
/dev/nvme01p2	fedora-nvme-boot	ext4	n\a
/dev/nvme01p3	fedora-efi	fat16	flags: boot, eps
/dev/nvme01p4	fedora-nvme-home	ext4	n\a

The important thing is to have a separate EFI partition -- the rest comes down to personal preference.

Create mount points and mount:

$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/nvme-{root,boot,home}

# copy root
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/nvme-root
$ sudo rsync -aAXS --info=progress2 --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found","/home/*","/boot/*"} / /mnt/nvme-root

# copy boot -- important not to copy the 'efi' dir
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/nvme-boot
$ sudo rsync -aAXS --info=progress2 --exclude={"/boot/efi/*"} /boot/ /mnt/nvme-boot/

# copy home
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p4 /mnt/nvme-home
$ sudo rsync -aAXS --info=progress2 --exclude={"/home/*/.thumbnails/*","/home/*/.cache/mozilla/*","/home/*/.local/share/Trash/*"} /home/ /mnt/nvme-home/

Takes around 15 minutes in total.

Configure GRUB EFI in chroot

$ - host shell

$$ - chroot shell

1. Mount required file systems and chroot:

# to have a functional chroot
$ for fs in (proc sys dev run); do sudo mount --bind /$fs /mnt/nvme-root/$fs; done

# prepare boot partition for chroot
$ sudo mount --bind /dev/nvme01p2 /mnt/nvme-root/boot

# mount EFI partition
$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/nvme-root/boot/efi
$ sudo mount --bind /dev/nvme01p3 /mnt/nvme-root/boot/efi

# start chroot
$ sudo chroot /mnt/nvme-root

2. Edit fstab

$$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid | grep nvme

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 15 Aug  4 13:03 85DA-A891 -> ../../nvme0n1p3
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 15 Aug  4 13:03 9d78f34a-4ab0-4ab9-a48b-7682a4b52188 -> ../../nvme0n1p1
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 15 Aug  4 13:03 a4debf2a-5c07-47e6-95bf-fc87a544d9f9 -> ../../nvme0n1p2
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 15 Aug  4 13:03 ffa22844-a6c3-4e60-b806-1fa5683e794c -> ../../nvme0n1p4

$$ vi /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Tue Jan  3 09:09:17 2017
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
UUID=9d78f34a-4ab0-4ab9-a48b-7682a4b52188 /                       ext4    defaults        1 1
UUID=a4debf2a-5c07-47e6-95bf-fc87a544d9f9 /boot                   ext4    defaults        1 2
UUID=85DA-A891                            /boot/efi               vfat    umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2
UUID=ffa22844-a6c3-4e60-b806-1fa5683e794c /home                   ext4    defaults        1 2

2. Generate GRUB config

$$ dnf reinstall grub2-efi shim
$$ grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

3. Rebuild initramfs with support for NVMe

This is vital. Without it, the NVMe disk can't be located, and the splash screen will eventually drop you into dracut rescue, stating that the drive with UUID=<nvme-root-uuid> can not be found. This is why we need to explicitly enable the NVMe driver, so don't fall into the rabbit hole of using efibootmgr to create new UEFI entries.

$$ echo 'add_drives+=" nvme "' | tee /etc/dracut.conf.d/nvme.conf
$$ dracut -f

Boot Fedora from the NVMe drive

At this point, Fedora 27 should boot after the Fedora (<nvme-drive-name>) is selected from your motherboard's the boot menu.

Well that's put an end to about 24 hours of hair pulling... the initramfs rebuild is what I'd missed, and my raid 1 setup (both disks on nvme) complicated matters. Thank you!