[tde-users] Re: switching to sdd boot drive

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?