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I have a working system with a USB drive attached. I want to clone the internal drive to the USB drive. That much I know how to do. My hangup is making that USB drive bootable. it starts to boot but gives me grub errors. I am not a grub exert and need some help adding that drive to grub so it will boot properly. Assuming, of course, that grub is the real problem. TIA.

Wt Riker
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  • UEFI or BIOS? You cannot boot with clone attached as duplicate UUIDs/GUIDs are not allowed. It may boot one time from one drive and the other next time, getting them totally out of sync. Better to just do full install to USB drive, if UEFI be sure to have ESP partition on external, so you can configure it to boot and rsync /home & data to USB drive. – oldfred Aug 26 '23 at 19:13
  • Not sure I understand. The USB will be booted when the internal drive is offline or damaged or on a different platform. So there should be no conflict, right? I'm not worried about them getting out of sync since it hardly ever changes. – Wt Riker Aug 26 '23 at 19:35
  • If UEFI, the boot files are probably on the internal drive's ESP. Only if old BIOS and you specifically specified during Something Else install option to have grub boot loader on external drive would it then boot on its own. If UEFI you have to add an ESP, update fstab and reinstall grub to have it boot. Do you have ESP on external drive? – oldfred Aug 26 '23 at 20:59
  • It is UEIF but I don't know about ESP. Since it is a clone of the internal drive I didn't think it would be this complicated. I thought just another grub entry would be sufficient. I'll have to look at ESP. – Wt Riker Aug 28 '23 at 13:40
  • https://askubuntu.com/questions/1294353/understanding-my-boot-efi-tree/1294463#1294463 and example grub.cfg in ESP. https://askubuntu.com/questions/792413/how-to-set-grub-from-second-linux-distribution-as-default-in-uefi-boot and no duplicate UUID or partUUIDs in lsblk -e 7 -o name,fstype,size,fsused,label,partlabel,mountpoint,uuid,partuuid – oldfred Aug 28 '23 at 13:55

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