February 2024 - nmglug - lists.coactcloud.com

Time in a bottle?
by Ted Pomeroy 29 Feb '24

29 Feb '24

NMGLUGers, Just caught up with this interesting issue on the brief history of time: debian-takes-proactive-steps-to-address-y2k38 <https://linuxiac.com/debian-takes-proactive-steps-to-address-y2k38/> It seems as if January 1, 1970 will cause a counting error in 2038. An interesting thought, as many of us deal with time and counting and who can forget the Windows issue on Y2K? It was a fun night, New Year's Eve 1999-2000. I never had so many supervisors attending my midnight hours as on that night. A real "Night Manager" only has the power to declare when a property moves to the next day. (It's based on when all the bills are ready.) Luckily there was no system failure back then. Looks like people won't have to worry in 2038, but you never know. See you at Glug this week? There may be other reasons some of us are "marking time." Thank you, Ted P

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UUIDs
by Brian O'Keefe 04 Feb '24

04 Feb '24

Hello All I think I've figured out why my newly cloned external SSD won't boot. It's not mounted on my ubuntu 20.04 system though I can see it in "Disks" or GParted. Since it is a clone the UUIDs are the same and that confuses GRUB, or something. With GParted I can supposedly generate a new UUID for it but that fails with an error and an invitation to visit GParted to try and work that out. So I found a help page at superusers.com and this about setting a new, random UUID. I'm pretty sure that if the external drive didn't have the same UUID as the internal SSD, it would boot and also be mounted when running from my internal SSD. Here's their fix: 12 <https://superuser.com/posts/1159006/timeline> UUIDs are not hardware-specific but stored in the partition's filesystem. That means cloning a disk or partition with|dd|will result in the same UUID. You can assign a new UUID by using: * |tune2fs -U random <device>|(ext2/ext3/ext4) * |xfs_admin -U generate <device>|(xfs) * |reiserfstune -u $(uuidgen) <device>|(reiserfs) * |mkswap -U $(uuidgen) <device>|(swap) Having duplicated UUIDs doesn't necessarily lead to errors. However booting and mounting a device by UUID will become ambiguous and may lead to the wrong device being used. So I ran: sudo tune2fs -U random /dev/sdb2 tune2fs 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020) This operation requires a freshly checked filesystem. Please run e2fsck -f on the filesystem. I'm reluctant to run the "Please" command as I know fsck can be a powerful tool. Since I can't yet mount the cloned disk I can't see how I can run the command to check it. Any help is greatly appreciated! Oh, I can also see that the cloned drive is a backup when I boot the live thumb drive. Everything is in there. However, in case I need it to restore data it would help if I could mount it.

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cloning upsize
by Brian O'Keefe 03 Feb '24

03 Feb '24

Hello All As a prelude, I am reaching capacity on my internal 256GB SSD and so am wanting to utilize the 1TB SSD I have. I'm running Ubuntu Mint on an ASUS 15" laptop, version 20.04. I successfully cloned my 256GB SSD to a 1TB SSD. I used the entire space as one partition. When I check with GParted I see that is actually the fact. However when I boot the laptop with the 1TB SSD as a USB drive the machine boots from that drive automatically. When I check the BIOS on booting I only see the 1TB SSD as a Boot option if it's connected as a USB drive, not the still installed 256GB SSD. If I unplug the 1TB drive the laptop boots from the internal drive. In the BIOS I can see in each instance the specific drive (the 1TB USB drive or the internal 256GB drive) as the only option to boot as opposed to seeing the external 1TB drive and the internal drive and being able to choose. Why the machine boots automatically from the plugged in 1TB USB drive is an unknown to me. At least the drive is cloned and will boot. Before I replace the internal drive I'd like to have that full 1TB available. If I can make that happen then I can upgrade the distro and replace the internal drive with it. Any ideas on how to get those almost 750GB on the 1TB drive to be accessible? Thanks for any help! --

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cloning away, sort of
by Brian O'Keefe 01 Feb '24

01 Feb '24

Hello All, I'm working on cloning my laptop 250GB SSD to an external SSD of 1TB capacity. As I've done in the past I tried booting from a GParted CD but in this case I can't. In the BIOS there is only the laptop SSD as a boot option. Maybe Ubuntu 20.04 doesn't even recognize the CD? In any case I'm creating a bootable thumb drive and will try that. As you all know, I need to boot from an external drive to use dd to clone the laptop drive. Just an FYI Cheers! --

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Cloning again
by Brian O'Keefe 31 Jan '24

31 Jan '24

Hello All I hope that February turns out to be a good month for all. We need one, yes? Once again NMGLUG has saved my chestnuts, what with my updating and upgrading errors that rendered it impossible to do either. Ted, you were pivotal in getting the bugs out and my setup works just fine. I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 with Mint desktop. I've been itching to upgrade the distro to 22.04 but as usual am afraid that some mess will result. I usually have glitches that I need to fix after an upgrade but I've always worked them out. Now what I'd like to do is clone my 250GB SSD to a 1TB SSD for the added space. I had already cloned my 250GB drive onto the 1TB but never upgraded it as I wanted to do. So I have a several months old cloned drive of 300GB partition and the remainder unformatted space. What I don't know is if I need to reformat the 1TB drive in any manner or just delete the 300GB partition and have a 1 TB, unformatted drive, as it came when new. Or, do I need to delete the partitions and either have all 1TB unformatted or format the 1TB as ext4 or something? Thanks again folks and may the FOSS be with you Brian --

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