Howdy All! I recently got a bitchin’ new SSD, a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB and I am struggle bussing trying to make it my new boot drive on my computer while keeping all of my programs and settings and things just the way I like them. Specs are I7 13700K cpu and an RTX 4070 gpu plugged into an MSI MAG Z790 Tomahawk Wifi mobo all working harmoniously to run Opensuse Tumbleweed.
Things I have done so far:
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Googled that shit, didn’t find much that helped me unfortunately. Found some forum where a guy was trying to move over to an SSD from a HDD and then remove the HDD, whereas I just want to change the boot drive to SSD and continue using both drives in the same rig. Someone else in that thread recommended clonezilla but then further down I read something about UUIDs(?) being copied as well and being unable to use both drives in the same computer or it can cause issues and corrupt data. That scared me off that.
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Tried using the Yast Partitioner tool but the scary warning box it makes you click through and the general lack of any clue what I’m doing scared me off that.
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Decided to just fresh install Opensuse Tumbleweed onto SSD with usb and then mount the HDD so that I can just copy everything over that way. Or so I thought. First I ran into the issue of the /home located in HDD not being viewable by my user on the SSD, I guess. Fixed that by unmounting the drive and remounting it with the following appended to the end of the mount command ‘-o subvol=/’ , I got that from google as well. Now I’m able to view things in /home on HDD from the user on SSD and I’ve even copied some things over. However I’m unable to access the .snapshots folder in the root directory of HDD which I intended to copy over the latest snapshot and use it on the SSD install to bring all of my non /home stuff over.
So I’m kinda stuck in the middle of transferring over now. I have an inclination toward being lazy so I don’t really want to spend time installing all of the flatpaks and configuring the OS again if I don’t have to. Mostly because I’ve already had one false start with Linux and went ahead and started fresh so this would be the third time having to set everything up again from scratch. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!
sudo blkid shows all UUIDs are the same as the partitions they are cloned from. I’m unable to mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 (SSD root partition) and it gives a “bad superblock” error. A little bit of googling led me to attempt to use the command
sudo btrfs rescue super-recover -v /dev/nvme0n1p2but it told me “all supers are valid, no need to recover” I then runsudo dmesgand seeBTRFS error (device nvme0n1pe): bad tree block start, mirror 1 want 2521222217728 have 0BTRFS error (device nvme0n1pe): bad tree block start, mirror 2 want 2521222217728 have 0BTRFS error (device nvme0n1pe): failed to read chunk rootBTRFS error (device nvme0n1pe): open_ctree failedI think you’re right I am 99% confident I have seen the /boot/efi directory on my system before in the past.
I am using Mint as my live USB image. But now I’m thinking it might have been wiser to use an opensuse tumbleweed live image since id reckon it would be better equipped to handle btrfs.
I think I might need to clone the drive again to fix the superblock issue but I don’t know if I want to do it for what would be the 4th or 5th time now. I might just bite the bullet and fresh install to SSD again and copy my /home over and set everything up again. It will be a pain but not as big as this is becoming lol
I am very appreciative of your time though! And this experience has certainly taught me more about Linux and gave me some familiarity with new commands. So thank you again!
Yeah sorry I’ve not come across that error before so I have no idea how to fix it without copying the partitions again. I don’t think its anything to do with you not using an Opensuse image, other distros should be just as capable of handling Btrfs. I understand if you’ve had enough by now and would rather just do a fresh install! However if you would still like to try cloning it I’ve tested and it should be possible using gparted (assuming you can shrink the existing partition small enough to begin with). Small disclaimer, its possible to lose data if shrinking the partition goes wrong so don’t do this if you don’t have an existing backup or you’re not comfortable potentially losing the data!
First boot into the live USB with your old HDD connected. use gparted to shrink the main root partition and apply the changes. Just pick a size thats below the space available on the new drive but a bit bigger than the minimum size you can shrink it to, you can resize it properly once its copied over. Then reboot and check that the HDD is still bootable. Then boot back into the live USB with both drives connected, and delete all the existing partitions off of the new SSD and apply the changes. Open the terminal and run lsblk to check if the swap partition is mounted, you’ll probably see /dev/sda3 is listed as swap, if it is run sudo swapoff /dev/sda3 otherwise it won’t let you copy it.
You should then be able to use gparted to copy/paste the partitions between the 2 disks. When you copy the swap partition make sure it goes at the end of the disk so you can grow the main partition afterwards. For some reason when testing in a VM I also found I had to increase the size of the swap partition by 1MiB or the copy process kept failing. Apply the changes, then grow the main partition to fill the remaining empty space and apply the changes once again. After that you should be able to reboot and disconnect the HDD and you should have a usable system! If you want to use the existing HDD as a data drive I would just delete all the partitions after plugging it in and create a new one, that will ensure it has a new UUID. However I would wait a couple of days to make sure you’re happy everything cloned properly!