Installing an OS over the existing OS

[Phil]

On 19/2/23 10:44, Aaron Rainbolt wrote:

That's a bit odd to my mind, as usually you can just do a disk 
transplant like that and it should work. If you take the drive back out 
and connect it to your working laptop, can you see files?

Yes, there are several directories, including boot, grub, a home 
directory and all the normal files that are usually on a newly created 
installation.

Most likely something is not quite right in grub.cfg - perhaps it's 
trying to boot off the drive that was originally in your working laptop, 
rather than the drive it actually installed to. If you can get it to 
boot right once, you should be able to run "sudo update-grub" in a 
terminal and I believe that should fix the problem.

"ls" anything at the grub rescue prompt gives the same result "unknown 
filesystem"

I looked through the grub.cfg file (the one that reads do not manually 
alter this file or something to that effect). When I ran the 
installation I elected to place grub on /dev/sdb which was the external 
drive on the working laptop. I also ran "sudo grub-install /dev/sdb" 
just in case. I also ran "sudo uptade-grub" for good measure.

The installer formatted the disc as ext2.

I'll look for differences between the non-booting drive and the drive on 
the working laptop.

-- 

Regards,
Phil