Can't clone the USB stick wher I've installed ESXI 7: hypervisor not found error

[marietto2008]

Hello.

At the beginning I have installed esxi 7.0 on a 64 GB USB stick. Wnen I tried to upgrade esxi 7,it stopped the procedure telling that there is not enough space on the disk. Then I have cloned byte by byte the content of the USB stick to a larger USB disk. When the cloning process is finished I rebooted the PC and I clicked on the item "UEFI OS (WD 3200BMV External 1.75) the disk where I have cloned the USB stick and I saw that it does not boots at all. It says : "Hypervisor not found". I mean : the disk boots properly,but as soon as it did,that error message is displayed and it comes back to the main boot menu. Is there a special reason for that ? thanks.

[daphnissov]

You cannot clone an ESXi installation to another medium. You will have to reinstall.

[marietto2008]

oh my god. what's the technical reason under this specific choice ?

[nachogonzalez]

Let me try to explain:

When you install an operating system pointers are generated so it's OS kernel can know where and when to find a program or binary.
If you copy and paste those files to a new location and remove the Boot disk, the OS kernel (Windows, Linux, ESXi) won't where the binaries are and it will fail.

ESXi runs most of it's operating system in-Kernel but looks for commands on the boot disk, changing the boot disk won't regenerate the pointers so the OS won't know where to find the binaries and ESXi will stop functioning (if Boot disk is removed)

Let me know if explanation was clear