Yay! As of a few minutes ago, my "CodeQuest" laptop is finally booting from its SSD from Linux (instead of the live usb only)!
This has taken about 3 install attempts (following about 2 months of having it on Linux via the Live USB, and doing a full copy/clone of the drives last night - details later)
Why 3 attempts?
1) First one I made the mistake of trying to set up a manual GPT setup on what was apparently a legacy BIOS that could only support MBR and MBR only (presumably... or I stuffed it up, and only after wasting *ages* grovelling over the partition sizes in MiB vs MB/GB)
2) Second time, I tried doing a MBR one with multiple partitions again. This time sticking the root one first. Again that failed. (Or maybe I still did stick in a "bios-grub" one at the start, which is again where it fell down)... Should I have mounted that as "/boot" to get it to work? Or selected something else?
3) This last time, I gave up and just let it use the "Erase Disk" option, which generated a single partition (ugh... I do want my homedir separate from the OS stuff!). That finally worked.
I'm slightly annoyed though that the installer doesn't transfer any settings from the Live USB session over immediately, and requires reinstalling stuff manually.
* Fortunately, it looks like for the majority of the Plasma stuff at least, I just had to copy the ".config" and a bunch of other data dirs from the liveusb config I'd set up. After then rebooting, it seems that I at least get that part of environment back the config I'd set up previously (though further testing is still needed)
* EDIT: Annoyingly, it seems that "konsole"'s shortcut keys are NOT stored in that .config dir, so I will have to reset my "Ctrl-Shift-X" shortcut key manually (i.e. Clear and Reset).
* EDIT 2: Ahh... maybe I should've copied my .local folder too
* EDIT 3: For the "snap" version of Firefox that's installed by default, the best way to migrate is to leave the overall snap folder on the new host alone, but to pull in just the profile folder (located in "~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla") from the liveusb, then modify the profiles.ini to point to it. Then, the next time you start Firefox, it will not only load all your stuff again. (Maybe the extensions will need manually reinstalling though, or maybe I missed some other folder that needs porting still)
In any case, I shall be disabling the snaps ASAP I think... But for initial usage + testing, I've just left them in place to avoid dealing with all the mess just yet.
* Unfortunately, that means I will also now have to re-check all the stuff I had installed and will have to reinstall now. Which will be "a few" things... (Note to self: Next time, just maintain a declarative script for doing all this, OR look into what something like NixOS can do)
At this point, I may just leave it at this, until trying to reinstall the LTS over the top after checking it works stably for my machines... But still, 1/3 "current" Windows machines is now converted now!
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Prior to this morning's eventual success, here's the breakdown of how last night's setup + lead up to this whole process went down...
Also, see previous episodes in this series about the struggles getting this particular laptop to even boot from a USB... (*damn you secure boot!*)
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Update 1: 10:11pm
Well... looks like I'm back on the ongoing saga to backup + migrate machines.
Today's target: My old laptop.
So far:
* Have finally verified that Windows won't boot anymore after what I did to it to get Linux to boot
* Therefore, I might as well move onto stage 2 tonight - i.e. Am now running GParted on the thing to clone all the partitions to the empty drive I got for this very purpose!
* The first attempt was a dud (as I didn't realise that it recorded all my poking around actions as one of the actions it will perform... hence it promptly backfired!)
* Now it's running the second run, which will probably take a few hours at least... Hopefully when that's done, I'll be able to verify if that worked!
* Next up: Depending on whether I'm satisfied the backups worked, I might as well install the 25.10 setup that I'd pretty much polished up, and then look into grabbing the new 26.04 LTS that is finally launched today, and run that as my new "trial" version that I may then overwrite the now installed 25.10!
Fingers crossed that all this works according to plan this time round!
(And yeah, am probably going to just leave it off Secure Boot / EFI at this stage, as that laptop gave me hell trying to get it to boot from anything else when in EFI mode)
Update 2: 11:33pm
Ooh... the copy operation done this way is a lot faster (though the drives are smaller)
Earlier it was > 2h on the 1TB HDD, and now is down to 1.5h... Giving it 30-60 min extra, I might be able to play with the next steps from 1:30 / 2 am onwards 🤓
Might have to do a good round of secondary backups on some of that data before I pull the trigger for real, but it's looking promising that this time goes better 🤞
Update 3: 01:42am
Woah... it didn't actually need the extra time! The Linux time estimates were accurate! 🤩
And now, doing secondary backups to a secondary drive, but in a haphazard way, things are also moving very quickly on that front!
WTF?!
Update 4: 03:10am
Eep! I've just hit the install button (after spending ages trying to figure out the stupid partition sizes (*1))...
It's always scary having to blast away all the existing partitions on a drive and forever lose one extra copy of whatever was on there, but in this case, I didn't really see a way to keep the stuff that was there (given that the SSD is rather small - only about 240 GB reported)
Oh well... hopefully I've backed up what was there that I might want enough! 😅
(Also, there's the whole matter of whether selecting GPT was a good idea or not, when parts of the screen still talked about MBR...)
(*1) Why on earth does it have to use the stupid "MiB" units instead of just "MB" / "GB" (which it then displays the specified values in)?! It ended up being guesswork, adjusting things up/down without being able to drag to reorder or anything, and Google's calculations being out by a magnitude...
Update 5: 03:28am
F**K! The stupid BIOS doesn't seem to pick up that there is the new GRUB / GPT stuff on there!
Guess I'll have to try reinstalling / repartitioning tomorrow after getting some sleep to come up with a new plan of attack 😫
Otherwise, I've now well and truly bricked my laptop from booting without a USB stick plugged in now!
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