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?
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.
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?
Can the old laptop run from the old drive OK?
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.
Showing fdisk -l and/or lsblk -f I/O here could be instructive, as could inxi -Faz I/O from old and new laptops.
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.
Cloning can be rather tricky business. I stopped using dd to do it long ago. I typically use either ddrescue instead, or something else specially made for convenient facilitation of cloning or partitioning of storage, such as DFSee: http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee.
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?
On Wed August 20 2025 17:23:21 dep via tde-users wrote:
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.
Different drives of the "same" size can actually be slightly different sizes.
I use dd to zero a partition or to put an ISO onto a thumb drive but otherwise I always use rsync which is like cp -av but I find it thinks more like I do even when only copying locally.
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.
Back around 1982 a sysadmin mistyped one letter of a disk to disk backup command on a VAX and us programmers had very little we could do for the next several days while the system was rebuilt from mag tape.
To say I am at a loss is an understatement. Everything else seems to work.
On Wednesday 20 August 2025 17:23:21 dep via tde-users wrote:
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?
Ever since my own bad experience with a brand-new, never-used SSD that I put in my brand-new, never-used laptop (hoping to bypass pre-installed Microsoft crap, etc.), I have avoided them. My own setup now is almost back to stone tools; that's how I dealt with it.
I wonder, however, can you take out the SSD (both new and old), and use an SSD enclosure to read its contents with another machine. (There are some other gadgets that can read SSDs, but enclosures have their own power source.) If so, then maybe not all is lost, and maybe you do still have at least your dot folders.
In my own case, this is more or less what I did, anyway. I only just managed to rescue the files I had saved on the SSD; then the very next time I tried to boot that SSD, I got the black screen with a blue rectangular box asking for a password (apparently, to open the SSD, which was not encrypted, at least not by myself). I managed to mount it once, as a separate external drive, using an enclosure attached to another screen, and I verified that I had rescued everything that I wanted. After that, I never could mount it again, and now it serves as a reminder never to buy SSDs, ever again, as I feel sure that they will come out with something newer and supposedly better, and I will fall for that trick again.
If you have your dot folders, and they are intact, then you can copy them somewhere on another disk, then just do a regular installation. Then, copy over your saved dot files, and overwrite the defaults.
Myself, that's pretty much always the way I do it, anyway. And I always save copies of my home folders, from my most recent working system, before I wipe everything and do a reinstallation.
That way, even if my current home folder somehow gets corrupted, I can still do a fresh installation, and copy over an earlier home folder. I might lose a few recent items; but even there, I try to back up to a separate drive.
This might not be quite what you want, but it might save your current home folder, or at least some of it.
Good luck.
Bill
said William Morder via tde-users:
| Ever since my own bad experience with a brand-new, never-used SSD that I | put in my brand-new, never-used laptop (hoping to bypass pre-installed | Microsoft crap, etc.), I have avoided them. My own setup now is almost | back to stone tools; that's how I dealt with it.
I had one previous experience, with a cheap SSD and pooped out after a couple of months and produced no performance improvement as far as I could tell. But this one is high-end and guaranteed for five years. And I do not think that this situation involves a drive issue.Having two drives, one a mechanical and one an SSD both fail at the same time and the same place and wipe the data from that point forward -- all while reporting no errors -- suggests that it wasn't the drive.
Fortunately, there was nothing on the machine that I didn't have on a different machine elsewhere, except for the configuration files for the applications, which though annoying and time-consuming can be replaced.
Fortunately, I see that Matrix OS is back among it, and in that I hope to write about it soon it's an opportunity to wipe the whole ThinkPad and reinstall with Matrix. To which I'll happily add Enlightenment, for fun. I wrote about it yesterday (and TDE as well) here:
https://ofb.biz/safari/article/1344.html
Thanks very much. It'll all get sorted out. I posted here hoping that someone would say, "Oh, yeah, that sometimes happens. All you need to do is . . ."
Although I can't figure out why dd should have "wiped" a partition (did you use any complicated dd command?), for backups and copies I rely on Image for Linux.
Yes, you pay for it, and some have pretended that you where just paying for dd, but as far as I am concerned it never failed me.
Thierry
said Thierry de Coulon via tde-users: | Although I can't figure out why dd should have "wiped" a partition (did | you use any complicated dd command?), for backups and copies I rely on | Image for Linux.
sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress
(They were of course unmounted, and the machine was running on sda)
I cannot understand at all why it nuked the ~/home partition on the source drive. Additionally, it finished normally and reported no errors. I am at a loss to explain it, nor can I find and similar reports. The target drive not working out, perhaps. But ruining the source drive seems almost impossible. But there I am.
| Yes, you pay for it, and some have pretended that you where just paying | for dd, but as far as I am concerned it never failed me.
Nor me before, either. And I've used it to copy very big drives full of important data. This time was not a critical loss. The other times it would have been. In that sense, I'm very lucky.
DD did well. Perfect copy of a disk...which got a problem. B4
Likely missing dir inadvertly move with cli or mouse gesture -before- the DD action.
Check the copy, the ssd. .. conenient...
Trust dd. Was in blockmode. Could not have effect on fs.
dep via tde-users schreef op 21-08-2025 02:23:
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?
said Frans via tde-users:
| DD did well. Perfect copy of a disk...which got a problem. B4
Thanks, but no, you're wrong. What I posted was the *after.* Before I did the DD, this drive was just fine and had been running perfectly in the desktop. This was what dd did to it. Or something weird while dd was running that corrupted both the original and the target.
-
dep -
Felix Miata -
Frans -
Mike Bird -
Thierry de Coulon -
William Morder