Laptop - back in action!

The SSD in my laptop (an 80GB Intel unit of questionable age that I was gifted by a friend) has started showing some alarming issues (errors in dmesg) so it was time to do something about it. I’d been meaning to get another SSD for my desktop (it currently having the 500GB SSD from my laptop for quite some time) so that I could put the SSD back in it, specifically I wanted to put the image back on the SSD that I took from it using dd as there is commercial software on there that I can’t reinstall, that I haven’t finished reverse-engineering yet.

So I bit the bullet and ordered an SSD Monday night (Labour day) and ordered an SSD for my desktop, and it arrived Wednesday (PCCG continue to impress). I spent Wednesday night reinstalling Windows on my desktop, and set aside a 50GB partition for Linux for work, and installed that. Everything looked good for Thursday, so I went to work as usual, then after work I disconnected all the drives from the desktop (because I’ve made that fucking mistake before), hooked up the old SSD and the hard drive with the disk image on it. Booted up Ubuntu on a USB stick (which proved to be a mistake because Linux is missing SIGINFO so you have to guess how long dd has left based off write speeds).

So far so good, despite running off the end of it (as it’s a 750GB with 500GB worth of partitions on it), stuck that in my laptop and it fired right up and began the arduous task of updating Windows. Sweet!

Hook everything back up on my desktop and Windows started up, thought nothing of it, ate dinner and so on. Then for some reason I rebooted my desktop and noted that the grub menu wasn’t appearing. Uh oh.

Turns out when my desktop’s new SSD was reinstalled, it picked Windows’ UEFI loader instead of grub. Then Windows, in a very borg moment, seems to have decided to “repair” my drive and restore it’s own loader everywhere. I spent a while trying to understand how the fuck to reinstall grub to UEFI from a USB thumbdrive, and in the end I just wanted to go to bed so I just reinstalled Linux just to get it ready for work again today.

Quite happy with the performance of the laptop though, considering it’s age. I did make one tweak - disabling Turbo Boost as I’m no longer gaming on it and it significantly reduces the fan noise not having it on, at little appreciable difference in performance from my perspective.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

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Horsham, VIC, Australia

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