Joe

People get a lot of things wrong. Awhile ago someone did a study showing people an unidentified copy of the USA Bill of Rights and most Americans thought it was a communist document!

OK. Thanks! I'm going to leave chat in a minute or two if I don't hear anything further from you.

that's on sda4

I have entries in the grub menu for sda6. grub-customizer runs update-grub when it saves its edits

sda96 => sda6

typo again

sda96 => sda69

BTW, thank you for all your efforts!

OK. When I get back to this (hopefully late tonight) I'll copy the grub stuff from sda4 to sda96 and see if that helps. That should copy the results of running update-grub on sda4 to sda6. I can't get sda6 to boot, so I can't do an update grub there unless I do some chroot stuff - which I'm clueless about. I tried a few flails at it the other day and found that I don't know enough about it to get it to do anything.

Should I just copy all of /boot/grub from sda4 to sda6? It would be kind of weird if it switched from one /booti/grub to another one in the middle of booting. But, I don't know how it works.

I was thinking I may need a separate boot partition to address that. All my mods to grub are being saved on sda4, not sda6. As for the fstab, I manually mounted sda6 and edited it before trying to boot using it. I have not modified grub on sda6. I don't know what's really going on, but it looks like it never mounts sda6 - so it never gets to look at grub there. But I could definitely be wrong.

It says something about being in initramfs and busybox ash shell.

Do you know anything about the la la land I end up in when it doesn't boot? I end up with a CLI, but I have no idea what might make sense to do there.

So aside from the fact that it doesn't work, everything is fine. ;)

OK. I won't try that ;)

OK. I'll try that. But I won't get back here for awhile. I have to call it a night here shortly. I would love to just pull the drive out. I'd put in an SSD. But it would probably void my extended warranty and I might have parts left over after I reassembled it. If not for that, going that route would be much easier.

Hi. I haven't used SE chat before. If that's the only thing that looks wrong, I can try it, but I'm on the notebook right now, so I will lose this connection if I reboot.

I don't speak grub. That's why I use grub-customizer. However, the current / that works is on sda4 and that entry says gpt4. So I extrapolated from that and since the new / partition is sda6, I put in gpt6 for it. I don't know if that's right or not.

My notebook is one of the annoying new ones with no user accessible drive bays. I have to take the whole thing apart to replace the drive. What I was ultimately hoping to do was to get a new version working in the new partitions then switch those to be the default partitions and start the whole process over using the old root and home as the new test partitions. I don't want to do this just once. I seriously hesitate to disassemble my notebook. I'm not known for my manual dexterity.

Given that everything necessary to make it work should be displayed in the code blocks above - including the grub entries that I did modify as you suggest - before I asked this question, can you see anything specific that I got wrong? If there's anything else you need to see I'll gladly provide it.

So, essentially, you're saying that my approach didn't miss anything, just something in one of the steps I took is wrong. I used grub-customizer to do exactly what you recommend, but it didn't work for some reason. That's why I included so much grub detail. I started out with just UUIDs and no LABELS. I still ended up in initramfs/ash with nowhere to go.

Unfortunately, I have a notebook and booting from an external drive that might get physically disconnected during operation is not an attractiiipve proposition. I keep hearing good things about clonezilla, but the last time I tried it (a long time ago), it didn't seem that easy to use.

@curiousdannii Wikipedia has a very dark underbelly. Nothing positive about holistic health is tolerated and any other science that isn't exactly mainstream gets edited out. There's a lot of censorship going on there. Impartiality is not something they seem to value.

Thanks. That works. I'll try adding my comment to the answer and see what response I get.

Thanks. I love stack exchange, but why is it so hard to find the page on this forum that lists privileges earned?

I'm trying to comment on an answer to a question. I have 10 points on this forum, so I probably can't do that, but the "edit" tag let me open someone else's answer to change it (I didn't). I'm confused.