Clone Raspberry Pi boot drive - SSD to SSD

Question

I have a Raspberry Pi, with the lite version of Raspberry Pi OS, OpenMediaVault, and Plex installed. The drive is below 70% health, so wanted to replace it with a new drive. I tried cloning it with CloneZilla, but booting the new disk on the RPI, says GPT: No bootable partitions.

I copied the disk sector by sector, so I would assume, it's a perfect copy.

EDIT: So this is what happened. First boot, it was just in an endless loop of not finding a bootable partition. Second, was when I was writing the first message here, but after a long endless loop of not finding a bootable partition, the system was suddenly booted up correctly. Third boot, there were a few messages on the screen, then a total blank screen for a long time, but the SSD is flashing constantly.

Answer 1

Fixed.

I found out, there was another software, GParted, that could work with partitions, almost like CloneZilla. It can't copy partitions from one disk, to another, but it has a build-in terminal, so that I could use dd. Not that I knew that dd could copy disks 1:1, I thought it was for files and folders only. But this guide helped me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmFuBiKtes0

I could see in GParted, that the MBR was not the same size, in the Clonezilla copied MBR, so not a perfect copy. But I verified with sudo gdisk /dev/sdb, that there was a functional MBR, the disk just wouldn't boot more than once, out of ten attempts.

So I ran sudo dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sdb to make a new copy of all partitions (I verified which disk was which with sudo smartctl -i /dev/sdc & sudo smartctl -i /dev/sdb), then attached the new disk to the RPI 4, and it booted right up. And it has booted up all times, I've tried since.

So I didn't really use GParted, other than for Linux command line access via terminal, as my PC is Windows only. And the drives were the same size, so I had no need for the features of GParted. Btw., both CloneZilla and GParted was running from an .img image, on a USB, then booted up.

And yes, Raspberry Pi 4 can actually boot from a GPT boot record, but you have to reformat the disk, and do a lot of stuff, so not an option, and unneeded for my case.