Can't boot notebook from SSD

[Xen]

MR ZenWiz schreef op 07-05-2017 2:58:
> 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?

The most obvious thing is just to try again and if you want to keep 
booting UEFI and if it typically requires a bigger boot partition, then 
this time you would create a typical space for kernels which to be safe 
would be 250-300MB.

Perhaps it is indeed weird that one disk boots fine and another doesn't. 
Did you also copy the partition table? That's a dangerous thing 
particularity if you used LVM because of competing UUIDs, but I think 
you can export and import partition tables just fine.

The least you can do though is follow standard procedure in creating a 
bigger UEFI partition.

Before you reboot after the installation you enable your root password 
by chrooting into it and doing "passwd".

The installer may unmount /target after it finishes, in that case you 
first have to mount it again, but if it is already done creating the 
password file with your user in it, you can probably do it while it is 
running.

So you require a "tryout" session in which you can open a root window 
(just open a shell and type "sudo su", the password should be empty) and 
you can run "passwd".

I find it strange that it locks you out while having no root password, 
my experience has been at one point that it doesn't even care when you 
don't have one. But the root password may also be disabled by setting it 
to some random string, I don't remember.

Good luck in any case then. Regards.