Can't boot notebook from SSD

[MR ZenWiz]

On Sat, May 6, 2017 at 8:04 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6 May 2017 at 16:34, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Does an SSD require the EFI partition where a hard drive does not?  Confusing.
>
>
> No, but you only need 1 of them, on the boot drive.
>

Perhaps I was unclear.  I only have either the SSD or the HDD
installed when booting, not both

I tried a different approach.  I mounted the SSD while running from
the HDD and rsync'd everything over except /dev, /proc and /sys.

Then I ran the usual recover procedure (mount the SSD to /mnt, bind
/dev, /run, /proc and /sys to the corresponding /mnt directories,
chroot'd and ran update-grub).

When I rebooted, it came up farther but died with an error "[FAILED]
Failed to start set console font", then another one with "and keymap"
at the end, then it just stopped.

I typed ^C and ^C and finally <ctl><alt><del> and it came up in
"emergency mode" andaslked for the root password or ^D to reboot.  It
would not accept my root password, and it just hung after I typed ^D.

I don't know if that' progress or not...

Now I'm back on the HDD boot again.  Pretty frustrating that what
should be a fairly simple disk replacement should be so convoluted and
fail so many times.

What next?

Thanks.