Howdy All! I recently got a bitchin’ new SSD, a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB and I am struggle bussing trying to make it my new boot drive on my computer while keeping all of my programs and settings and things just the way I like them. Specs are I7 13700K cpu and an RTX 4070 gpu plugged into an MSI MAG Z790 Tomahawk Wifi mobo all working harmoniously to run Opensuse Tumbleweed.

Things I have done so far:

  1. Googled that shit, didn’t find much that helped me unfortunately. Found some forum where a guy was trying to move over to an SSD from a HDD and then remove the HDD, whereas I just want to change the boot drive to SSD and continue using both drives in the same rig. Someone else in that thread recommended clonezilla but then further down I read something about UUIDs(?) being copied as well and being unable to use both drives in the same computer or it can cause issues and corrupt data. That scared me off that.

  2. Tried using the Yast Partitioner tool but the scary warning box it makes you click through and the general lack of any clue what I’m doing scared me off that.

  3. Decided to just fresh install Opensuse Tumbleweed onto SSD with usb and then mount the HDD so that I can just copy everything over that way. Or so I thought. First I ran into the issue of the /home located in HDD not being viewable by my user on the SSD, I guess. Fixed that by unmounting the drive and remounting it with the following appended to the end of the mount command ‘-o subvol=/’ , I got that from google as well. Now I’m able to view things in /home on HDD from the user on SSD and I’ve even copied some things over. However I’m unable to access the .snapshots folder in the root directory of HDD which I intended to copy over the latest snapshot and use it on the SSD install to bring all of my non /home stuff over.

So I’m kinda stuck in the middle of transferring over now. I have an inclination toward being lazy so I don’t really want to spend time installing all of the flatpaks and configuring the OS again if I don’t have to. Mostly because I’ve already had one false start with Linux and went ahead and started fresh so this would be the third time having to set everything up again from scratch. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
    3·
    21 hours ago

    If you want to clone the existing system onto the new ssd, here’s the broad strokes of what you can do.

    1. Get a usb stick and write your linux distro of choice to it. Doesn’t really matter which one, we’re just using this to clone the system drive to the new drive. You want the system drive to be totally inactive during the clone which is why you’ll do it from a live usb rather than with the system itself booted.
    2. shut down the system
    3. Install the new ssd. DO NOT REMOVE THE CURRENT SYSTEM/BOOT SSD. You should now have two ssds installed.
    4. If you can’t install the second ssd, plug it in to usb via an enclosure
    5. Boot from the live usb
    6. open the terminal
    7. run lsblk and note the /dev/sdX path of the system drive. Write it down.
    8. From the same output, note the /dev/sdX path of the new ssd. Write it down.
    9. Use the dd command to clone the system drive to the new ssd. The command will look like this:

    `dd if=/dev/existingBootDrive of=/dev/newSSDDrive bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct’

    This command will clone the exact data of the system drive to the new ssd. the if portion of the command stands for in file, as in the source of the data you want to clone. Make sure that is your existing boot drive. of is the out file, the destination of the clone. Make sure that is your new ssd.

    When you do this, the new drive will appear to be the same size as the old drive. This is due to the cloning, but is easily resolved by resizing the partition(s). How you do this depends on the filesystem, so refer to this guide for resizing

    1. Once you’ve resized the partition/disk, double check the partition UUIDs on the new ssd against what’s in /etc/fstab on the new disk. To do this, run blkid to get a list of all the partitions and their UUIDs. Note the UUIDs of the partitions on the new ssd.
    2. To check /etc/fstab, you’ll have to mount the root (/) partition of the new drive somewhere in the live system. In the terminal you should already be in the home folder of the live system user. Make a new directory with mkdir. Call it whatever you want. So something like: mkdir newboot
    3. run lsblk and make note of the root partition on the new ssd, then mount that to newboot (or whatever you called it) with sudo mount /dev/sdX newboot (where X is the actual device label for the root parition of the new drive`
    4. open /etc/fstab with your terminal text editor of choice. Compare the UUIDs to the ones you noted. If they are the same, you’re golden (they should be the same, but I’ve also had them change on me. ymmv). If they are different, delete the old UUID and replace it with the new UUID for each respective partiiton
    5. Shut down the system
    6. Remove the old boot drive, and install the new boot drive in it’s place
    7. Boot the system. If all goes well, you’ll boot right into tumbleweed as if nothing has changed except you’re running from your shiny new ssd
    8. If it doesn’t boot, boot again from the live usb, and again check the UUIDs to make sure there were no mistakes
    9. Keep the old SSD unmodified in case you need to revert back to it.
      • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
        2·
        14 hours ago

        You could. I didn’t even think about it. I’m used to using dd, but clonezilla is a totally viable option here.

    • Marafon@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      20 hours ago

      Thank you so much! I’ve only got the one SSD and one HDD, sorry that I wasn’t very clear in my original post. But I think I can follow your detailed instructions and resolve this. I’ll report back when I’ve had time to do as you’ve described. Again, much appreciated!

      • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
        2·
        20 hours ago

        No worries! Happy to help, and the instructions will work with the HDD, just use the HDD/boot as the in. I shouldn’t have assumed the existing boot was an ssd. Good luck!!!

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    2·
    21 hours ago

    You don’t even mention attempting to change the boot order in your CMOS/BIOS. Have you done that, or manually this drive as a boot target?

    • Marafon@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      21 hours ago

      Sorry I can boot into either one and can change boot order via bios, yes. I’m trying to merge two installs now basically. I want my SSD to be my one and only boot drive but have all of the settings and programs from the HDD brought over to the fresh install. And then use both drives at the same time. If that makes sense. Sorry for any confusion.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        2·
        20 hours ago

        Okay, so that clarifies it a bit. Unfortunately, you can’t just merge the two different installs, but what you CAN do is just clone the existing SSD over to the new one, them make that your boot drive. That seems to be the simplest option for you.

  • macniel@feddit.org
    2·
    21 hours ago

    So let me get that straight. You have an external drive that you want to boot from. What’s with the HDD where does that came from and what’s that about?

    In any case I wouldn’t recommend to regular boot from an external device but from an internal HDD/,SDD.

    • Marafon@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      21 hours ago

      No, sorry. My computer had a single HDD. Now I have a new SSD that I would like to add to the machine and use in conjunction with that HDD.

      • macniel@feddit.org
        3·
        20 hours ago

        Well that’s easy then. Install the SSD, boot from your usb stick with your preferred Linux distribution. Install Linux to your nvme0 device (that’s your SSD) and let the installer format it in the recommended way.

        Then after the installation reboot into your new Linux. If the old bootloader triggers instead, you need to change the boot order so that your SSD boots first.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
    2·
    21 hours ago

    What boot loader do you use? Grub and REFind are the most common, but there are others: Clover, LILO, Lemine, systemd-boot, syslinux… how you tell your computer which thing you want you boot from depends on your boot loader.

    However, I suspect the issue is more simple: did you go into your BIOS and switch where the firmware which device to try to boot from? If you’ve added a new HD and you want to boot from it, this is _always_¹ required.

    1. Ok, not always. I suppose there exists some BIOS that always shows you a menu and asks which device you want to use, but that’s uncommon.
    • Marafon@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      20 hours ago

      I’m 99% sure I’m using Grub. I did go into my Bios to change the boot order and I also have it set up currently where it will give me a few seconds at startup to choose which drive I want to boot from while I figure my mess out.