Upgrading the frame.work boot drive

on frame.work

Motivation

If you have read the prior frame.work post, you would know that I chose to use the external USB modules for the boot drive(s) of various OSes and share the internal NVME for a workspace.

I had initially started with the boot OS being a 250gb drive. Due to one program taking up half that space, I decided it was time to upgrade it.

Upgrading

I bought a new 1tb USB drive from frame.work.

I ended up following the instructions from Wolfgang Ziegler.

To recap:

  • I ran sudo lshw -class disk -class storage -short to verify that the old 250gb drive was /dev/sda and the new 1tb drive was /dev/sdb
  • I became root with sudo su - root
  • I ran pv < /dev/sda > /dev/sdb
  • and wait… and wait… at least there was a progress bar
  • I ran gdisk, choosing /dev/sdb, write, Yes, and Yes
  • At this point there was a little divergence from the article. I tried removing the old drive and booting on the new one. It did boot, but the / filesystem was read-only.
  • After trying a few things (random commands, replugging, rebooting), something eventually clicked. I don’t honestly know what did the trick.
  • Now, I was rebooted as myself with the 1tb now reporting as /dev/sda
  • I ran sudo gparted and resized the used partition to take up the remainder of the space.

And everything seemed to be working…

No boot device

Hours later, I got a blue screen on boot:

Default Boot Device Missing or Boot Failed
Insert Recovery Media and Hit any key
Then Select 'Boot Manager' to choose a new Boot Device or to Boot Recovery Media

This kind of reminded me of the problem I had switching back and forth between Ubuntu and Arch Linux.

I tried various BIOS settings, rebooting it, various keyboard keys…

What finally got it working again was:

  • Unplug the 1tb drive
  • Power up to this disappointing blue screen
  • Plug in the 1tb drive
  • Hit OK
  • When the new screen came up, they cursors didn’t work; just hit Enter
  • Once it boots, just run sudo update-grub (not sure if it was really necessary).
  • Reboot once more to make sure everything is OK

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