13 Aug
2021
13 Aug
'21
7:46 p.m.
On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 14:28:14 +0000
dep <dep(a)drippingwithirony.com> wrote:
Greets, folks . . .
The nifty little WD 500gb SSD has arrived. I stuck it into a little USB
adapter device and seem to have succeeded in dd'ing my boot
partition. /dev/sda1, onto it. I have employed the appropriate utility to
give it a unique ID, and have labeled its first partition as BOOT. (My
home partition, on the existing /dev/sda, is labeled HOME, and /etc/fstab
are edited to mount LABEL=BOOT as / and LABEL=HOME as /home.)
If things weren't unnecessarily complicated, I could go into the bios and
tell it to boot from USB and check the thing before I mounted it
permanently. Ah, but . . . There's no nice, normal setting to set boot
order in the frigging bios! I can't tell it to just boot from USB and call
it a day. Instead, it offers a variety of choices that include booting
from a drive that has no operating system at all, so it's not smart or
anything like that.
I did update-grub on the existing hard drive installation and it saw and
added the SSD install. Here things get weird: sometimes it shows it and
sometimes it doesn't. Ubuntu in its wisdom has screwed around with the
GRUB2 menu. Initially it didn't't show up at all; after I dicked around
with it a little a few days ago I got it to appear. Even then, it isn't a
GRUB menu as we know it.
By fiddling around with the bios I can get a menu that contains the
SSD -- /dev/ssd1 -- to show up in the GRUB menu, but sometimes not. And
even then, if I select the SSD installation, it does fiddle a little with
the SSD on the way in, but boots to the /dev/sda1 install.
Now, this is especially problematic because the hard drive boot is, as I
mentioned, from /dev/sda1, while /home is /dev/sda3, so just yanking that
drive is not among the relatively convenient possibilities.
I'd like to boot from it, of course, for reasons including the ability to
run update-grub on it, so that the default boot would be from the SSD when
it is happily installed in the system. (After which I'd open a terminal
and again run update-grub so that GRUB would get everything in its final
configuration, with booting from the hard drive possible in case of SSD
failure.)
Any ideas? Prefarably as opposed to guesses?
All I've got is guesses, alas.
There might be a bad root= entry in grub.cfg somewhere.
It might be using unupdated grub information from sdd to boot (may be
fixable by editing grub.cfg for that drive without running any utilities).
You might have edited the wrong copy of fstab (the one on sda rather than
the one on sdd)—don't laugh, I've done dumber things.
UEFI might be sticking its fingers in the pie, in which case it may not be
possible to clean up the mess.
You may need to update an initram somewhere.
Personally, at this point I'd re-edit the fstab and disable mounting /home,
dummy up an empty home directory for your primary user on the new drive
if necessary, then pull the cable on sda temporarily (the less-extreme version
of Michael's solution). That will be enough to verify that the new drive boots.
Then you plug sda back in and delete the dummy home directory on sdd.
E. Liddell