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? -- dep
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On Friday 13 August 2021 09:28:14 am dep wrote:
Ubuntu in its wisdom has screwed around with the
That's your first mistake ;) . Don't use Ubuntu. Might I suggest MX Linux :) Their Live USB works flawlessly...
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.
Any ideas? Prefarably as opposed to guesses?
Known to work:
- Yank everthing but the new SSD - Boot from the SSD to a command shell * - Update grub - [Optional] Personally I'd remove grub from every other drive - Put the rest back - [Optional] Use UUIDs in fstab and crypttab
Best, Michael
* https://askubuntu.com/questions/92556/how-do-i-boot-into-a-root-shell
said Michael: | On Friday 13 August 2021 09:28:14 am dep wrote: | > Ubuntu in its wisdom has screwed around with the | | That's your first mistake ;) . Don't use Ubuntu. Might I suggest MX | Linux :) Their Live USB works flawlessly... | | > 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. | > | > Any ideas? Prefarably as opposed to guesses? | | Known to work: | | - Yank everthing but the new SSD | - Boot from the SSD to a command shell * | - Update grub | - [Optional] Personally I'd remove grub from every other drive | - Put the rest back | - [Optional] Use UUIDs in fstab and crypttab
Thanks very much, though you left out "burn down your house and everything you own and use the computer at the library," but I'll forgive that because your other suggestions were so . . . comprehensive. -- dep
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dep,
Thanks very much, though you left out "burn down your house and everything you own and use the computer at the library," but I'll forgive that because your other suggestions were so . . . comprehensive. --
Correct. You have to first fire-up that grey substance somewhere in the top of the head. Then you can burn down whatever you like .... or not.
Regards.
On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 14:28:14 +0000 dep dep@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
Anno domini 2021 Fri, 13 Aug 14:28:14 +0000 dep scripsit:
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?
UEFI?
Nik
-- dep
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said Dr. Nikolaus Klepp:
| UEFI?
Ha! I fiddled around in the bios a little and some magical combination of changes led the GRUB entry for Ubuntu 20.04-LTS on /dev/sdd1 to, um, take. Booted that and it worked and I'm running on it now. (Checked via the mount command.) Did an apt upgrade and fortunately a new kernel came in, and the automagic update-grub now lists a Ubuntu 20.04-LTS on /dev/sda1.
So, in keeping with the time-honored Linux method of I dunno, I just did some stuff and then it worked, it is now working, and I'm looking forward to the magnificent increase in speed that I've heard so much about.
UEFI figured in there somewhere; the significant change was changing "UEFI then Legacy" to "Legacy then UEFI" I think.
Thanks, everybody. -- dep
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On Friday 13 August 2021 14:31:48 dep wrote:
I'm looking forward to the magnificent increase in speed that I've heard so much about.
Speed is the worst drug of all. At first you will feel that you are running just a bit faster, and it will be nice. But then you'll get used to it, and you'll start to wonder again why your machine is running so slow.
It never stops. That's how these things are designed to work, so that you need to buy more, and run even faster.
Bill
said William Morder via tde-users:
| Speed is the worst drug of all. At first you will feel that you are | running just a bit faster, and it will be nice. But then you'll get used | to it, and you'll start to wonder again why your machine is running so | slow. | | It never stops. That's how these things are designed to work, so that | you need to buy more, and run even faster.
I have often considered what it would be like to boot and run one of my old OS/2 installs on my current system. When OS/2 2.0 was released IBM said that we needed 4 but preferably 8 mb -- not gb, mb -- of memory. And I had a luxurious 340mb Micropolis hard drive (purchased at the they-ll-never-be-this-cheap-again price of $650). So it should be possible to load the entire system into a ramdrive and have, what, 31 gigs of memory left over. I think it would run pretty quickly.
Remember when the computing world was *outraged* that a full install of Winword 2.0 ran 20mb? That was when you could fit Wotd for DOS onto a bootable 360k floppy; if you wanted the help files, you'd need to install it on a bootable 3.5-inch 720k floppy.
Makes one think that things have gotten a little slow and bloated, no?
Then again, Linux used to run perfectly well on a Pentium 133 with 8 megs or so of memory. Probably not the case anymore. <g> -- dep
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dep composed on 2021-08-13 21:57 (UTC):
I have often considered what it would be like to boot and run one of my old OS/2 installs on my current system. When OS/2 2.0 was released IBM said that we needed 4 but preferably 8 mb -- not gb, mb -- of memory. And I had a luxurious 340mb Micropolis hard drive (purchased at the they-ll-never-be-this-cheap-again price of $650). So it should be possible to load the entire system into a ramdrive and have, what, 31 gigs of memory left over. I think it would run pretty quickly.
I've been running "OS/2" for 9 years on this motherboard: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813135022 and this CPU: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27249/intel-core-2-duo-...
Virtually 24/7 it's what I'm running, but occasionally I boot it to openSUSE/TDE: # inxi -pa | grep hpfs ID-8: /hpfs/F raw-size: 800.1 MiB size: 800.1 MiB (100.00%) used: 609.6 MiB (76.2%) fs: hpfs block-size: 512 B ID-9: /hpfs/G raw-size: 1.95 GiB size: 1.95 GiB (100.00%) used: 1.91 GiB (98.0%) fs: hpfs block-size: 512 B ID-10: /hpfs/H raw-size: 933.4 MiB size: 933.4 MiB (100.00%) used: 865.8 MiB (92.8%) fs: hpfs block-size: 512 B ID-11: /hpfs/I raw-size: 2.44 GiB size: 2.44 GiB (100.00%) used: 1.95 GiB (79.7%) fs: hpfs block-size: 512 B ID-12: /hpfs/J raw-size: 58.59 GiB size: 58.59 GiB (100.00%) used: 44.19 GiB (75.4%) fs: hpfs block-size: 512 B # inxi -bay System: Kernel: 5.3.18-lp152.87-default x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 7.5.0 parameters: root=LABEL=16s152 ipv6.disable=1 net.ifnames=0 noresume mitigations=auto consoleblank=0 5 Desktop: Trinity R14.0.10 tk: Qt 3.5.0 info: kicker wm: Twin 3.0 vt: 7 dm: TDM Distro: openSUSE Leap 15.2 Machine: Type: Desktop System: ELITE SYSTEM product: P965T-A v: 1.x serial: N/A Chassis: Intel type: 3 v: P965T-A serial: N/A Mobo: ELITE SYSTEM model: P965T-A v: 1.0x serial: N/A BIOS: Phoenix v: 6.00 PG date: 08/30/2007 CPU: Info: Dual Core Intel Core2 6400 [MCP] arch: Core Merom speed: 1628 MHz Graphics: Device-1: AMD RV370 [Radeon X600/X600 SE] driver: radeon v: kernel bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 1002:5b62 class-ID: 0300 Display: server: X.Org 1.20.3 driver: loaded: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa display-ID: :0 screens: 1 Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1400x1050 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 370x277mm (14.6x10.9") s-diag: 462mm (18.2") Monitor-1: DVI-0 res: 1400x1050 hz: 60 dpi: 87 size: 408x306mm (16.1x12.0") diag: 510mm (20.1") OpenGL: renderer: ATI RV370 v: 2.1 Mesa 19.3.4 direct render: Yes Network: Device-1: Intel 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 driver: e100 v: 3.5.24-k2-NAPI port: bf00 bus-ID: 04:03.0 chip-ID: 8086:1229 class-ID: 0200 Drives: Local Storage: total: 298.1 GiB used: 72.75 GiB (24.4%) Info: Processes: 154 Uptime: 0h 16m wakeups: 1268 Memory: 1.93 GiB used: 432.7 MiB (21.9%) Init: systemd v: 234 runlevel: 5 target: multi-user.target tool: systemctl Compilers: gcc: N/A Packages: N/A note: see --pkg Shell: Bash v: 4.4.23 running-in: konsole inxi: 3.3.06
Technically what I have is called eComStation, which since has morphed into ArcaOS. https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/
said Felix Miata:
| I've been running "OS/2" for 9 years on this motherboard: | https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813135022 | and this CPU: | https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27249/intel-core-2- |duo-processor-e6400-2m-cache-2-13-ghz-1066-mhz-fsb.html | | Virtually 24/7 it's what I'm running, but occasionally I boot it to | openSUSE/TDE: # inxi -pa | grep hpfs
[much deletia]
| Technically what I have is called eComStation, which since has morphed | into ArcaOS. https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/
[tl;dr unless you have an interest in OS/2, which you probably don't]
I still have an OS/2 install on a pretty nice ThinkPad 750C, though I don't use it much. Though I have friends who went the eComStation route, when the IBM guys at Personal Software Products told me in an interview that IBM wasn't pushing OS/2 anymore and that the company was instead promoting Java because it ran so wonderfully everyplace, I got a $50 book with a Caldera 1.1 CD in the back. (It used a closed-source desktop called Open Look, or Open Glass, or Glass Look, or something, which resembled Windows 3.x.)
Was sad. I'd been involved in OS/2 not as long as Mike, who would have been working with 1.2 EE and such, because I don't think it had a TCP/IP stack before then; I started out in the early 2.0 pre-beta ("Limited Availability" in IBMspeak), where the official channel was -- really -- Prodigy! (Which was headquartered two blocks from my apartment, above the Sears store and which was embarrassingly a joint venture between Sears and IBM.)
Eager to upgrade to 2.0 GA ("General Availability"), I tried to find it the day it was released. None of the software stores, of which there were many, had it. This in Westchester County, where friggin' IBM is headquartered! I phoned around and finally found some guy in the office who had a box of OS/2 that he agreed to sell me if I would drive there and pay full retail, which I did.
We actually had an OS/2 birthday party at a hotel in White Plains on I think the second anniversary of GA. We had a user group and Lee Reiswig, the legendary Blue Ninja, would attend. "If you don't have a CD drive, get one," he said a few weeks before the release of OS/2 3.0 "Warp." I covered the rollout at a theater in NYC and still have the Black canvas Land End-style briefcase they gave to each reporter, full of literature and statements from software and hardware vendors who would support OS/2 Real Soon Now, none of which actually came to pass, and of course OS/2 3.0 itself. (I carried that bag with me to Linux World Expo in 2000; my Linux Planet colleague Michael Hall called it "dep's bag of broken dreams.")
OS/2 2.x's real major actual software score was Corel Draw! for OS/2, which was a half-version behind the product for Windows and never caught up. (And I still have it on floppy someplace.)
Though by far the best word processor ever, well ahead of its time, was DeScribe for OS/2, published by a lunatic named James P. Lennane (who ran for president of the United States for a short time). There were some other native applications, though most of them were written using the horrible and unstable "Mirrors" translation layer. My girlfriend lived in Raleigh, which was fortuitous because that's where Indelible Blue, the only OS/2-only software shop was. Otherwise it was mostly whatever you could find at the Walnut Creek CD, available at computer stores. A big problem was that OS/2 ran Windoxs 3.x applications through an adaption of the Windows code, called WinOS/2, to which IBM still had rights. So why develop for one when you could develop for both? Further problem was that IBM hadn't actually developed "seamless" WinOS/2, which meant that winapps couldn't run under the OS/2 Workplace Shell desktop -- instead, you had to launch WinOS/2, which then took over the place. I'm not sure that that problem ever got worked out satisfactorily, and WinOS/2 was unbelievably less stable than Windows itself and could run only its own Solitaire reliably. WinOS/2 was also insanely slow.
If it froze or crashed or you didn't perform a graceful shutdown (and a lot of shareware prevented graceful shutdowns), the only way back was to boot from floppy and do a chkdsk -f on the hard drive. In fact, come to think of it, chkdsk was located on the second of the install floppies, so you had to boot from floppy, then when prompted insert the second floppy, then at the appropriate point bail out to a command prompt, and *then* run chkdsk -f. When that didn't work, and it often didn't, it was time for the dreaded rf-ri -- reformat and reinstall. This led many of us to purchase tape backup drives and invent innovative partitioning schemes.
It would have been a hit if IBM had had a clue, which it didn't and mostly doesn't. They were pushing it to business which, except for embedded installs in automatic teller machines at banks, didn't work. They never pushed it as an operating system that real people could use. It's the inverse of the all-but-late BlackBerry company, whose phones were excellent business tools but who went off the rails looking to sell to kids who wanted games and stickers. If Blackberry's marketers had been selling OS/2 and IBM's marketers had been selling Blackberrys, they's both be with us today.
The only thing remotely from that era that I ever run much today is Word 5.5 for DOS, which is available for free (!) from Microsoft. http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55... It's text-based, of course, but is a great word prcessor for writers. It runs perfectly in DOSemu and is actually more satisfying to use than a GUI word processor. I've run it in a full-screen console session, which is a joy, but usually run it in a console window, which is less so. Just remember to save your files in .rtf, because the .doc files it produces are read now by nothing remotely modern. (Something cool about it was that it was "family mode," meaning that if you installed it under OS/2 it was an OS/2-native app, and if you installed it under DOS or Windows it wasn't. I don't know if the version Microsoft is giving away is family mode, though.)
As to the need for computer speed, I'm beginning to realize that, well, actually, my computer is a lot faster than I am . . . -- dep
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On Fri August 13 2021 14:57:21 dep wrote:
I have often considered what it would be like to boot and run one of my old OS/2 installs on my current system. When OS/2 2.0 was released IBM said that we needed 4 but preferably 8 mb -- not gb, mb -- of memory. And I had a luxurious 340mb Micropolis hard drive (purchased at the they-ll-never-be-this-cheap-again price of $650). So it should be possible to load the entire system into a ramdrive and have, what, 31 gigs of memory left over. I think it would run pretty quickly.
OS/2? That brings back memories. I worked for three months in 1988 on IBM OS/2 networking as relations with Microsoft were starting to head south.
The initial objective was that a dentist could buy a box of OS/2 and take it to his office and install and configure it. However IBM had this corporate culture that any senior salesperson could demand a feature in order to (potentially) close a big sale. Meanwhile Microsoft by and large cherry-picked just the most sensible features.
My main contribution was a massive sed script - 500 lines, 2000 maybe, I forget - which converted the build makefiles from a couple of dozen DOS boxes to a half dozen boxes running an OS I'm not allowed to name and made it buidl an order of magnitude faster.
Meanwhile the networking had gotten so complex that I doubt if even 10% of the developers could install and configure it.
--Mike