Had to move my node from a 1 TB to a 2 TB drive \ stacker news ~bitcoin

My setup is an Intel NUC mini PC with 8GB RAM, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Bitcoin Core, Electrs and a few other services.

It was all on a 1 TB SSD (main partition 960 GB). I set it up in June of 2023 and thought it should last a year or a bit longer. And it did. It finally filled up and my node stopped working without me even realizing it when the used up space reached 850 GB or thereabouts.

Since more people may be in a similar position soon, I thought I'd summarize what I did in case it helps.

I decided on a 2 TB SSD and ended up buying a used Crucial MX500 off eBay for £72.

I was considering copying the timechain and all the settings, systemd jobs etc. manually and re-installing all the packages, but since my setup was manual and somewhat fragile (not an out of the box solution) I decided to clone it. After some research I went with Clonezilla, a Linux-based disk cloning tool.

I downloaded the Ubuntu-based .iso version and etched it on a USB stick using Rufus on a Windows machine.

I connected the new SSD via a USB adapter, booted the mini PC from the Clonezilla stick (with the old drive inside) and cloned the old drive to the new one.

It asked me a few questions, the most important one being whether to copy a single partition or the entire partition system. I went for the latter, because there were 3 partitions (main, EFI and one more?) and Ubuntu needs all of them to work; otherwise I'd have had to create and set up the other partitions manually, which is prone to error.

The cloning took 7 hours, with the USB adapter / port being the bottleneck.

After it finished I tried to boot from the new drive via USB, but it still booted from the old one, apparently due to a UUID conflict. I could have changed the UUID and updated the grub and /etc/fstab, but that seemed like a lot of hassle, so I ended up just opening the mini PC and replacing the drive in the SATA slot. After that it booted with no issues and everything was working fine.

I still had to fix something to get Bitcoin Core to start, namely the settings.json file was missing for some reason (maybe because it ran out of space on the old drive and broke it?) but got it to run and it's now syncing, from around block 851000 where it had left off on the old drive.

Now df says only 44% of the partition is used. It should last me a good few years!

7 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitalion 12 Sep

My recommendation for these cases is to use clonezilla similar to norton ghost or acronis in functionality. If your system is not damaged you should not have any problems https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1ILmeCGLYs

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @DarthCoin 12 Sep

Use an image disk software and make a clone disk to disk. https://clonezilla.org/ https://www.ubuntupit.com/gparted-an-open-source-and-free-partition-editor-for-linux/

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @SpaceHodler OP 12 Sep

That's what I did.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 12 Sep

For a Windows machine I would suggest to use Acronis Disk image, You can also make a bootable CD with Acronis and then make the cloning.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SpaceHodler OP 12 Sep

One thing I forgot to mention: After cloning I resized the main partition to fill the remaining space. I used GParted for that.