[TriLUG] New disk woes ( 13th )

[Bill Weinel via TriLUG]

On 8/13/22 09:19, Brian McCullough via TriLUG wrote:
> I had decided that, instead of trying to just "fix" the boot issue, I
> would just install a new, upgraded OS, on the new SSD.  Since the parts
> of the disk that would be affected by the install were in partitions
> different from the "important" ones, I felt fairly safe in this answer.
>
> I was also creating brand new partitions for root, usr and var, so that
> I could preserve things that live ouside of home, such as /etc/fstab.

Hi Brian,

Sorry to hear about your installation troubles...

I saw in some previous messages some had recommended using dd to copy 
disks. While that works, you get minimal to no feedback until the dd 
task completes. If it fails, you get to try again. :-(  For future 
reference, I would recommend using Clonezilla for this task. It's free, 
it provides excellent status information, and it does a much faster job 
of imaging your hard drive to either other other hard drive, or to an 
image file for storage and backup purposes. In expert mode, it can even 
re-size disk images as it copies as well. I typically use it to image 
all of my system hard drives here on a regular basis for backup purposes.

However, starting with a fresh install on a new drive is really the best 
way of doing things... It gets rid of the old O/S configuration files 
which are no longer used and cleans up your operating system 
environment. Also, by using a new drive for the install, you still have 
the old drive available to retrieve any needed data and to keep as a 
backup.

BTW, there were some significant application changes between 20.04 and 
22.04. One major difference is the way Firefox runs. In previous systems 
Firefox was an native linux application, now it runs as a snap. 
Consequently, the Firefox application data ends up in totally different 
places between the 20.04 and 22.04 systems, thus requiring manual 
intervention to sort it out.
> I had a couple of new installers on USB sticks, Debian 11 and Ubuntu
> 22.04 LTS, so started the process.

I believe some specific flavors of 22.04 were noted to have installer 
issues. I remember reading the installer notes and seeing that discussed 
on a few forums. In past Ubuntu releases, installer issues were 
sometimes linked to specific types of hardware used in on-board video 
cards. However, I don't know that this is the case this time.

Creating USB installation sticks can also be a problem depending upon 
how they are written. I recommend using Balena Etcher to build an 
installer USB stick, since it seems to produce a bootable USB 
installation stick every time.  However, you can always use the tried 
and true method of writing the image to a CD and using that for your 
installation. In either case, be sure to verify the SHA256 sums both 
after download of the image and after writing it.

> So I have put that on hold while I went to eBay, found a similar but
> newer machine, and ordered it.
Hopefully it's hardware and that will solve your issue.

All the best,
Bill