With the new Broadcom policies regarding ESXi, i decided to move away from VMWare. Fired up a Proxmox VE hypervisor on a different hardware, moved the other VMS there, and the plan for OMV was to convert it to bare metal. The "old" OMV was running on VMWare with HBA pass-through. The plan for the migration looked straightforward:

• Restore a backup to a brand new USB thumb drive
• Fix the networking (new network adapter device names)
• The shares should come up automatically since all the data drive are connected to an HBA that was presented to the OMV VM through PCI pass-through.

Initially, the migration was OK... until the first reboot. It straight refused to boot. The machine complains that there is no valid boot media. I managed to boot from the USB using SystemRescue ISO (on a different USB thumb drive) using the "Boot local Linux installation" (findroot), but that's not a solution. Tried every Grub repair scenario i could find with no success. If i restore the DD backup again, the system boots with no issue... until the next reboot. I am yet to try restoring from a backup (DD again) made while the system was running on bare metal (newer).

Any takes on what might be happening?

Maybe i should ditch the USB thumb drive and use an internal disk (i have a spare 120G SSD that i can use for this)?

EDIT: If it makes a difference, the restore was done using rufus on Windows.

Zitat von chente

An alternative path could be omv-regen. I think it's simpler.

Thema

[How to] Migrate/Restore OMV Settings to Another System with omv-regen

UTILITY TO MIGRATE OMV CONFIGURATION TO ANOTHER SYSTEM OR
DO A NEW OMV INSTALLATION AND KEEP THE SETTINGS




Si quieres leer todo esto en español puedes hacerlo en github

omv-regen

INSTALLATION:

Copy and paste the following line into a terminal and run it as root or with sudo.
sudo wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xhente/omv-regen/master/omv-regen.sh | sudo bash

• STEP 1. Create a backup of the original system with omv-regen.
• STEP 2. Do a fresh installation of OMV on the disk you want and

…

chente

29. April 2023

Interesting... Didn't know about this.

I have the option to do the regen from a working bare-metal installation (re-image the USB thumb drive from the backup) or from the VM (i can still boot the old ESXi on the same hardware).

EDIT: Reading through the docs makes me wonder why this not the default recommended backup/restore process instead of the "standard" disk image approach.

EDIT2: I guess the requirement to use the current available version of the system and plugins might be a deal breaker for a long term backup solution. Hence the recommendation to do the backup and regen as soon as possible.

A quick follow-up...

The culprit ended up being faulty USB thumb drives (plural). The migration issue was finally resolved by restoring a recent fsarchiver based backup (was able to create one in one of these occasions where the system would actually boot) to the internal SSD.