Get a same sized drive (or larger) and just dd it? I used to do that all the time, even to Windows installs, if I knew a drive was starting to become unreliable. I'd advise mounting the original/donor drive as read-only to mitigate any potential data losses while transferring. But dd makes a perfect bit for bit copy of any partitions, drives, etc that you feed it. Just don't get the inputs/outputs backwards! And always remember: dd stands for "disk destroyer" because if you get it wrong, bye-bye data.

Clonezilla Is what I normally use for cloning drives, including my boot drive. You flash it to a USB drive then.

Maybe look up a Youtube guide first but I've never had issues with it.

Assuming the new drive is an equal size or larger: Boot from a USB drive and use dd to clone the old drive to the new one. Then, remove the old drive and boot from the new one. You'll also need to resize the partitions on the new drive if it's larger.

I’m glad you got it sorted with dd.

One thing people don’t often realize about dd is that it copies all the data from one drive to the other, including uuids that were written when the old drives filesystem were created.

For that reason it excels at cloning one’s boot disk, because when the old drive gets removed from the pc, the clone drives os says at some point during the boot process “okay, let’s mount the filesystem with uuid ABC123 at /“ and it works.

Dd is also not the best tool for cloning disk that you intend to leave hooked up because if you do it’ll put the poor host os in a “I’m seein’ double here, four spidermen!” Type situation.

I used dd recently to upgrade the drive in a Steam Deck. Easy and worked perfectly.

Take one of your backups and restore it to the new drive.

You do have backups right?

Side note I would recommend creating automation to setup your device they way you want. Either bash or Ansible pull.

Linux is pretty forgiving. You don't even need to use dd, if you know what you are doing you can create a totally new partitioning format and just copy the files. Since getting the fstab just right in that case is more error prone, just using dd is simpler. If using dd, don't worry, you can resize partition afterwards.

If it were me, I'd do a fresh minimal install of the same OS, boot to the livecd and then delete pretty much everything except for /etc and /boot. I'd then cp -ar all my files from the failing drive and then manually merge /etc back. I say manually merge because most things would get replaced by my old files, but I'd manually modfify my fstab to keep the new partition information and add my extra mounts after it. Maybe that's just me though. You can also just dd and then resize partitions if necessary.

I did this recently. dd is fine, but you have to make sure you catch all of the places the UUID of the device is referenced. Maybe fstab, but certainly in the boot loader. This bit me, because the device IDs changed, and UEFI couldn't find the new partitions.

Make sure you have a bootable USB rescue disk, and you'll be fine. Even if you mess up like I did, it's just a matter of booting, mounting, and finding the config file you missed, and replacing the blkids.

You can partition your drive identically and rsync your directorys over. Rsync will keep all softlinks and hardlinks. You made need to reinstall grub tho.