I've been using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for about 3 years now, and finally used up all the space on my 1TB HDD. So I cloned my entire old 1TB HDD to a new 2TB SSD with gparted, expecting the outcome to be an exact clone, partitions and all, and bootable. When I installed the SSD into my computer (old Compaq CQ71, Celeron CPU 900 @ 2.20GHz) and tried to boot into Ubuntu (no dual boot, just Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), I got the black screen with "no bootable device" message.
I checked the new SSD with gparted, and it appears there's only one partition on it: /dev/sda1 (ext4), instead of the 3 on the original HDD. Also, the new SSD had about 20 MB less data than the HDD it was cloned from.
I tried booting with an external drive with a bootable copy of windows 7, and that opened fine (automatically, with no intervention from me).
I tried booting from the original 1TB HDD (that the new 2Tb SSD had been cloned from) via USB port, and that did not work straight out (same "no bootable device" message).
By fiddling around, I found out I can boot into Ubuntu, but only by connecting the old HDD to the PC via USB port, and changing the boot order in BIOS during startup between "notebook hard drive" and "USB hard drive". The original order between the 2 does not matter: I can only boot after switching one for the other.
Once I confirm the change in BIOS, I get:
- a purple screen with "GNU GRUB version 2" and "Ubuntu" highlighted, and once I press enter,
- a black screen with:
- [ 3.044423] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] asking for cache data failed
- [ 3.044471] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] assuming drive cache: write through
- /dev/sda1: clean followed by a file and blocks count.
Then it boots into Ubuntu, and I can disconnect the old HDD, and the PC works as usual until I have to start my computer again.
From my novice viewpoint, the fact that only 1 partition was cloned (or the 3 original were merged into 1?) is suspect, and there's evidently an issue with the boot process. So I guess my question is: can I fix the boot process without compromising the data on the SSD (it took 14 hours to clone), or having to repeat the whole clone process?
sda2
may be an extended partition andsda5
may be a logical partition within the extended partition. I have never tried to clone extended and logical partitions.