Moving system partition to another drive

paracetamol

Hey,

I am trying to move my / to a ssd drive. I cloned the partition from the hdd to a partition on ssd. I updated the /etc/fstab file (on both the old and new partition just to be sure). I ran update-grub. The Solus installation on the new partition appears as one of the options during boot, but when I chose it, I end up with the old partition being mounted under / anyway:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 100M 0 part ├─sda2 8:2 0 737.8G 0 part /media/windows ├─sda3 8:3 0 1K 0 part ├─sda4 8:4 0 450M 0 part ├─sda5 8:5 0 135.2G 0 part /home ├─sda6 8:6 0 8G 0 part [SWAP] └─sda7 8:7 0 50G 0 part / sdb 8:16 0 111.8G 0 disk ├─sdb1 8:17 0 50.8G 0 part └─sdb2 8:18 0 61G 0 part

(sda7 is the old /, sdb1 is the new /)

What am I missing?

caesar96

You missed this guide: https://getsol.us/articles/troubleshooting/boot-rescue/en/

You just have to update the /etc/fstab of the new partition and put the UUID of that partition in the root ( / ) line but maybe because you cloned it, they have the same UUID, assign it another UUID and put that in the file.

Now follow the guide I put above and you're done. Of course your PC should boot from the hard disk and not from the SSD because the SSD doesn't have a bootloader and the HDD does.

caesar96

And It's really ugly that you have your root partition at the end xD
I have assigned 50GB to my root partition just like you hahaha.

paracetamol

Maybe it wasn't clear in my first post, but I did update the the /etc/fstab file on the new partition. Also the UUID is unique, double and triplechecked that. Yet upon booting Solus still mounts the old partition as root.

The boot process goes like this:

GRUB lets me choose my system
I pick the one on /dev/sdb1 (the SSD)
The system boots, but I hear the HDD noises
I open up a terminal and upon typing lsblk I see that /dev/sda7 is mounted as root and /dev/sdb1 was ignored.

caesar96

dbarron he is using GRUB, so I don't think he has anything related to EFI
paracetamol did you followed this guide: https://getsol.us/articles/troubleshooting/boot-rescue/en/ ?? At least let me know. I did something like you and It works pefectly

dbarron

Well you can see if the efi boot record for the new system exists (efibootmgr) and change it to the new hd if it does. If it doesn't you will need to correct that.

paracetamol

caesar96 Yes, I did follow the guide. But just to be sure today I repartitioned the disk and followed all the steps word for word. The end result: root is mounted on HDD and SSD is completely ignored. This is frustrating. At this point I am considering a different distro.

caesar96

Or you just can boot from your SSD but you have to install a bootloader in it and after that followed that guide. It will work just fine.

caesar96

paracetamol just boot with the SSD instead of HDD, but first run grub-install /dev/sdb to install the bootloader into the SSD, so that way it can be bootable.

You are fine if you want to change to another different distro but this kind of issues are no related to Solus, so the official member teams will not care that much.

Have you tried this before??

dbarron

If in doubt, just reinstall fresh to your SSD (it's much easier anyway).

paracetamol

Finally got to the bottom of this. The problem was in the UUID or more precisely in the fact that despite editing the /etc/fstab file and then updating grub, the grub scripts still retained the UUID of the old partition in some places, but had the updated one in others (so one script referenced both partitions simultaneously - looks like a bug).

I used Grub Customizer to edit the boot script and replace the lingering occurrences of the old partition's UUID and now my system boots from the desired partition.