said Felix Miata via tde-users: | dep composed on 2025-08-21 00:23 (UTC): | > My SSD for the ThinkPad arrived, so I pulled the drive from the | > machine and using a separate machine to dd the contents of the | > existing drive onto the new one. It being a 1-tb drive on both ends, | > it took a few hours. dd reported success. | > | > I put the new SSD into the machine and booted it. I was happy to see | > it booted readily. I was less happy to see what happened next. | > | > I got to the nice graphical login window. I typed in my password. | > Screen went black with a mouse pointer, then after a few seconds | > returned to the login screen. Damn, I thought. So I shut down and | > reinstalled the original drive. | > | > And guess what? *Same thing*! Perfectly working installation has now | > lost the contents of its /home partition. Only thing there is | > /lost+found. This on the original drive, which dd shouldn't have | > touched at all. | > | > To say I am at a loss is an understatement. Everything else seems to | > work. | > | > Any informed guesses? | | Did you check for firmware update before starting to change things? | Buggy firmware can cause inexplicable behavior.
Firmware updates for *what*?
| Was the old computer booting a GPT disk in UEFI mode? If not, is the new | one known to support booting the old style configuration?
There is no new computer. Same computer, new hard drive.
| Can the old laptop run from the old drive OK?
Again, same computer. And as I mentioned, the entire contents of partition 6, which is /home, disappeared from *both* hard drives. Replacing the working hard drive on the computer with a supposedly faster hard drive. Using dd to make the copy.
| DD does not change UUIDs anywhere. New disks have device models and IDs | that are not modifiable unless by factory firmware change. Mixing new | hardware IDs with old software UUIDs can potentially pose a problem, | particularly if both disks are attached when a computer is booted. The | new computer's NVRAM would have had data from the new disk that you | eliminated using DD. Next boot it found software data the same across | boots mixed with hardware data that did not. If the boots were in UEFI | mode, buggy firmware could easily have been quite confused, possibly | also even if not UEFI.
Haven't ever had both hard drives connected at one time.
| Showing fdisk -l and/or lsblk -f I/O here could be instructive, as could | inxi -Faz I/O from old and new laptops.
It doesn't. All the partitions are as they should be. It is just that the one that gets mounted as /home is blank.
| Are you sure sync occurred on dd completion? Copying via USB can put a | lot into RAM that doesn't necessarily get flushed before program reports | completion, or removal or reboot is actually safe. Premature detachment | could mean incomplete dd write.
The last line echoed by dd was that they had synced. And they were plugged in to the computer where I was running dd for several hours after that.
And in any case, dd is not supposed to trash the source drive, no?