[ale] Cloning laptop drive didn't work

[Alex Carver]

Even weirder, I moved the USB cable over to the original machine and 
plugged the SSD into it through the mSATA/IDE adpater (so the chain is 
mSATA -> IDE -> USB). The machine booted from the SSD over USB just fine 
but it won't boot correctly when the SSD is installed in the IDE bay.

When I boot using the adapter in the IDE bay I get a lot of ata1.00 
revalidation failed messages plus many other ata errors. All I did was 
move the drive out of the IDE bay and onto the USB cable and it worked.

Now I'm completely lost why this worked.

On 2024-04-27 18:11, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> I'm giving the cloning of the individual partitions a try but I have an 
> additional question:
> 
> Suppose I just recreate the partitions from scratch on the SSD as blank 
> partitions and then rsync the files from the old drive to the new drive 
> accordingly.  What's the appropriate incantations to have grub write the 
> boot sector on the SSD when it's currently sitting in another machine 
> that was being used to do the cloning/rsyncing?
> 
> 
> On 2024-04-27 12:32, Boris Borisov via Ale wrote:
>> Clonezilla maybe.
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 02:43 Alex Carver via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-04-26 14:57, DJPfulio--- via Ale wrote:
>>>> On 4/26/24 03:42, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I made an image of the full drive and then dd'ed it to the SSD.
>>>>> Plugged it into the Toshiba and got the GRUB menu and the initramfs
>>>>> loaded. But then it just had all kinds of ATA timeouts and stopped in
>>>>> its tracks. I tried disabling ACPI and that didn't help.
>>>>
>>>> dd isn't the best tool for this.  ddrescue is much better since it
>>>> handles failures nicer and keeps trying to get the data.  I think the
>>>> package name is gddrescue. There are two versions, perhaps one is a
>>>> fork? IDK.
>>>
>>> I used ddrescue to generate the image and then used dd to write the
>>> image out to the new disk. But the old disk isn't failing, it's just
>>> slow so I wanted to switch out to the SSD.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>> If I plug the full stack of IDE adapter and SSD into a USB to IDE
>>>>> adapter and plug that into another computer I can mount the SSD and
>>>>> see all the files, no problem.
>>>>
>>>> USB adapters can lie to the OS about the drive characteristics. Of
>>>> course, we don't know this until later.  Of my 4 USB drive docks, 
>>>> only 1
>>>> of them lies, but it is a pain because that was the one I setup new
>>>> storage through and copied all the data over using.  When it was 
>>>> time to
>>>> put the HDD inside the case, all the drive parameters were different so
>>>> all that work was for nothing.  I freaked out a bit, since it was a new
>>>> 8TB WD Black that I'd setup and put about 2TB onto.
>>>>
>>>> Anyway, something to consider.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm not sure what the issue is at this point because everything seems
>>>>> to be in place. Thoughts?
>>>>
>>>> Sometimes life is out to get you. It isn't being paranoid.  But I don't
>>>> have any OTHER thoughts related to this topic.
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