Re: Booting an old PC to SSD that the BIOS cannot see

[Chris Green]

On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 10:32:40AM -0800, Robert Furber via Support requests 
for the GRand Unified Bootloader wrote:
> 
> On 2020-12-30 1:48 a.m., Chris Green wrote:
> >     :
> > > Hmmmmm.. It is an old (2012) PC with BIOS. To my knowledge, it is not 
> > > aware
> > > of UEFI and the BIOS is not aware of the PCIe NVMe SSD. However, after
> > > booting, Gparted can see the NVMe SSD and I can copy files to it (after
> > > partitioning and formatting).
> > > 
> > It's the Linux kernel drivers that allow you to see the nvme disk.
> > 
> >     :
> > Here's how my system like yours is partitioned:-
> > 
> >      Filesystem     Type 1M-blocks   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
> >      /dev/nvme0n1p2 ext4     48174  11681  33978  26% /
> >      /dev/nvme0n1p3 ext4    896193 313911 536690  37% /home
> >      /dev/sdb1      ext4     10016    176   9313   2% /boot
> >      /dev/sdb2      ext4    109596  27675  76313  27% /scratch
> >      /dev/sda1      ext4    938772 220811 670252  25% /bak
> >    :
> > 
> > Mine boots pretty fast, /dev/sdb is what *used* to be my system disk
> > and is a SATA SSD but my first pass at sorting this out had boot on a
> > spinning hard disk and while it is somewhat faster on the SATA SSD it
> > doesn't make a huge difference.  There's not much has to be read off
> > /boot.
> My sense is that a lot of the contortions you went through was to retain
> your old Xubuntu 19.04 HD so you could copy the contents its /home directory
> to the /home directory on your NVMe drive.
> 
Yes, that was somewhat important. 


> I took a lazier approach:
> 
>  * removed my old HDD and replaced it with a 120GB SATA SSD
>  * installed my new 1TB NVMe SSD in the only PCIe slot on my old
>    motherboard
>  * installed the latest Ubuntu from a CD (the BIOS on my mobo cannot
>    boot from USB)
>      o partitioned and formatted /dev/sda for /boot
>      o partitioned and formatted /dev/nvme0 for [swap], / and /home
>      o ignored complaints and "failure to install" messages from
>        installation s/w
>      o rebooted and failed to instruct the BIOS to boot from the 120GB
>        SATA SSD
>  * despite this, PC booted as desired ..about 4 times faster than it
>    did previously from HDD
>  * connected my old HDD to the PC via an external SATA "toaster" drive
>    (drive is popped in like bread in a toaster)
>  * copied contents (including '.' or hidden folder/files) from its
>    /home directory to the /home directory on /dev/nvme0
> 
> Now, I have a very fast PC.
> 
Yes, that's the idea! :-)


> By the way, I am curious as to why you put /scratch (swap?) on your SATA SSD
> and not on your NVMe SSD.
> 
It's just a place to save things temporarily, a name for some spare
space.

-- 
Chris Green