On Sun, Nov 24, 2024 at 05:56:25PM -0800, Charlie Gibbs wrote: > I have a 20-year-old box which was nonetheless enough to run Debian > Bookworm (12.5) - but the video card, equipped with an Nvidia GeForce > 610 GPU, was too old. I was getting messages on boot saying that it > was only supported by drivers up to version 390, while Bookworm doesn't > support drivers that old. > Fair enough: at 20 years old - that might also explain the flakiness on boot you mentioned. > Good to hear that you got an operational machine second try :) >
> But here's the catch. Since I was laying out the bucks for lots of new > hardware anyway, the salesman talked me into throwing in a 1TB NVMe SSD. > What the heck, might as well really speed things up. However, I want > to keep my existing hard drive; it's a fairly new 4TB unit and /home > contains large archives of music and video files. What I'd like to > do is move everything to the SSD - including the /home partition but > without the music and video files, which I'd leave on the spinning rust > in a renamed set of directories mounted elsewhere. > > Rather than doing a full re-install and copying massive amounts of data > back and forth, I'm trying to take a shortcut - which may or may not be > a good idea, but I'll let you guys judge. > No - REALLY don't do that - a reinstall will be quicker, especially since I see you were using legacy MBR install rather than UEFI (if that's how I interpreted the installation of grub-pc.) Do an install to the 1TB NVME using AMD64 media. Do it using LVM. Maybe use the expert install to allow you more flexibility in partitioning. If what you want to keep from your old /home is small, just copy it across as a directory called /oldhome and delete it once you're happy. [Dotfiles, some configs] Don't forget mail from /var or wherever your mail was stored. On the 4TB spinner, make a mount point called /data and move the music and video files across to sit under it. . Optionally, at some point, repartition the 4TB for everything other than the music data amd make another LVM volume for use. Maybe you want to keep a smaller swap partition on the spinning disk rather than swapping onto NVME but that's a choice. > Here's the output of lsblk: > > NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS > sda 8:0 0 3.6T 0 disk > ├─sda1 8:1 0 1M 0 part > ├─sda2 8:2 0 27.9G 0 part / > ├─sda3 8:3 0 7.5G 0 part [SWAP] > └─sda4 8:4 0 3.6T 0 part /home > sdb 8:16 1 0B 0 disk > sdc 8:32 1 0B 0 disk > sdd 8:48 1 0B 0 disk > sde 8:64 1 0B 0 disk > sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom > nvme0n1 259:0 0 931.5G 0 disk > ├─nvme0n1p1 259:5 0 1M 0 part > ├─nvme0n1p2 259:6 0 30G 0 part > ├─nvme0n1p3 259:7 0 8G 0 part > └─nvme0n1p4 259:8 0 893.5G 0 part > > As you can see, I've duplicated the partitions on the SSD. I also > copied the 30GB / partition to the SSD with dd, and changed the > UUID of the copy to avoid conflicts due to the cloning. I mounted > /dev/nvme0n1p2 (which I hope to make the new / partition) and > changed the UUIDs in its copy of /etc/fstab to point to the > partitions on the SSD. > Copying with dd just means that you've copied a chunk - it may not be aligned. > I think my problem is getting GRUB to go to the SSD. I tried the > following: > > sudo grub-install /dev/nvme0n1 > > The following messages came out (with a delay of several seconds between > them): > > Installing for i386-pc platform. > Installation finished. No error reported. > > (Is that first message correct? That sounds like old hardware.) > That's problematic, I think. > When re-booting, I went into the BIOS screen, and saw that the SSD was > first in the boot order. However, this probably doesn't mean much if > I didn't get it set up properly. The machine boots, but apparently > falls back to the hard drive. The first two lines of dmesg are: > > [ 0.000000] Linux version 6.1.0-23-amd64 (debian-ker...@lists.debian.org) > (gcc-12 (Debian 12.2.0-14) 12.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.40) #1 > SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.99-1 (2024-07-15) > [ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.1.0-23-amd64 > root=UUID=fb2c9cb9-1737-4bbf-b3e8-c5e88b40877e ro quiet > > According to blkid, that UUID corresponds to /dev/sda2, i.e. the / > partition on the hard drive. I'm obviously missing an incantation > to make the machine go to the SSD instead. In /boot/grub/grub.cfg > I find all sorts of references to the UUID of /dev/sda2, but the > file starts with a big scary "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE" message. > > I've been looking up GRUB documentation, but my eyes are starting to > glaze over. I get the feeling that I'm close, but don't quite have > the GRUB fu. Could someone provide some pointers? In some sense, all you have to safeguard is your music and video files. Hope this helps, Andy > > -- > /~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as > \ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | the first society that wouldn't > X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | save itself because it wasn't > / \ if you read it the right way. | cost-effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut >
