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shorty_mu

Member

Registered: 2019-04-15

Posts: 3

[solved] - dd'd disk on X1 Carbon not booting

Hi all,

I cloned my disk via dd over ssh from my old laptop (Thinkpad T440s) to my new one (Thinkpad x1 Carbon 6th Gen). On the new one I mounted all necessary partitions (/boot, /, /proc, /dev, /sys) and chrooted into the new system. There I changed the paths in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/default/grub to reflect the new drive from /dev/sda3 to /dev/nvme0n1p3, ran grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg and grub-install /dev/nvme0n1.

I use "legacy boot" and turned off all UEFI stuff (AFAIK) and Secure Boot. As live system I used the latest GRML. Before cloning the disk I ran an update on my old laptop

So , the thing is the X1 won't boot from the hard disk. If more information is needed, please let me know and I'll provide it. I don't want to post useless stuff here.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers and Regards, Shorty

Last edited by shorty_mu (2019-04-30 22:17:57)

WorMzy

Forum Moderator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 11,845

Website

Re: [solved] - dd'd disk on X1 Carbon not booting

Did you create a new initrd while you were chrooted? If not, then you're still trying to boot an image that is optimised for your old hardware (and therefore probably doesn't have the right modules for the new hardware). Boot the fallback image, or chroot back in and run 'mkinitcpio -P'

If that still fails, give us more information about the failure. What is it failing on?

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Omar007

Member

Registered: 2015-04-09

Posts: 368

Re: [solved] - dd'd disk on X1 Carbon not booting

I would agree that the dd method seems like a good idea to transfer your system over but sadly it is not in this case.

It's impossible to boot from an NVMe drive if you're on a non-UEFI system (be it because you switched to legacy only or because it's just still a legacy BIOS). Only an UEFI system has the required drivers available to initialize an NVMe drive for boot.
Now, there are ways to get around that if your system does not support UEFI (TianoCore, Clover; basically emulating an UEFI system) but the X1 should support UEFI just fine so I advice you to set it up as such.
The best option would probably be to re-do the NVMe drive; GPT partition it to your liking and instead rsync/cp -a everything over from the old partitions.
You WILL have to set-up the bootloader of your choice (for grub efi: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GR … llation_2) and boot/efi partition completely anew though. You can split efi and keep /boot on root if you want with grub, but you do really need that FAT32 efi partition!

The only way the dd transfer would have worked fine when moving from SATA to NVMe, would be if you were already UEFI booting and using GPT for the SATA drive. As your system is set up now, you can only use that NVMe drive as a data drive.

Last edited by Omar007 (2019-04-15 09:30:11)

mukl

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2008-01-30

Posts: 52

Re: [solved] - dd'd disk on X1 Carbon not booting

Still one could dd the partition(s) instead of the whole disk.

shorty_mu

Member

Registered: 2019-04-15

Posts: 3

Re: [solved] - dd'd disk on X1 Carbon not booting

Since I don't even get a "blimp" from Grub, I don't think rebuilding the Initramdisk will help. But I will give that a try. If that doesn't help, I'll make a new installation with UEFI on/Secure boot off and rsync my data. I so hoped it could've been easy
I'll update this when I'm done. Many thanks too all for helping.

Cheers, Shorty

Omar007

Member

Registered: 2015-04-09

Posts: 368

Re: [solved] - dd'd disk on X1 Carbon not booting

Still one could dd the partition(s) instead of the whole disk.

Technically speaking, yes, but you're only giving yourself a lot more work for 0 benefit.
1) You'd need to make sure the partitions you are creating on the target drive are at least as big as the source.
2) If they are bigger, you now have a filesystem to resize afterwards.
3) If the target drive is the same size as the source drive and all the partitions fit exactly to meet the constraint in 1), you're going to have to dd over and then shrink filesystems and partitions afterwards to make space for the EFI System Partition. Hopefully without corrupting anything.
4) You're reading and writing a bunch of bytes with no value (unless you were planning on recovering something from those bytes I guess)

Since I don't even get a "blimp" from Grub, I don't think rebuilding the Initramdisk will help. But I will give that a try. If that doesn't help, I'll make a new installation with UEFI on/Secure boot off and rsync my data. I so hoped it could've been easy

Sadly migrating to new technologies that aren't backwards compatible will require a bit more work

I'll update this when I'm done. Many thanks too all for helping.

Cheers, Shorty

Np and good luck.

Last edited by Omar007 (2019-04-15 13:53:05)

shorty_mu

Member

Registered: 2019-04-15

Posts: 3

Re: [solved] - dd'd disk on X1 Carbon not booting

Ok, installation completed successfully. Didn't hurt as much as I thought

Allthough I'm still struggling with the mousepad vanishing sometimes and USB devices (keyboard, mouse) not recognised when connecting to the thunderbolt dock it all works. But these things might go into another thread if I can't figure it out by myself.

Thanks a lot for all your help.