Re: Adding a new boot disk while keeping old disk
On Tuesday, 26-11-2024 at 17:03 Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> Many thanks to all of you who have replied to my questions.
> It seems that I've been creating trouble for myself by trying
> to kludge something together from the old installation.
> The only reason I tried this was the age-old problem I
> have whenever I start from a fresh install: I lose all my
> customizations and added packages that went into /usr, /var,
> /etc, etc. :-) It takes a while to put all this stuff back;
> for a month or so after a fresh install I'm discovering (and
> re-installing) missing things. I was hoping I could avoid
> this, but it seems that the time I'm spending on my jury-rigged
> "solution" more than offsets any savings I might realize.
>
> I bit the bullet and downloaded the Debian 12.8 installer to a
> thumb drive. To be safe, I unplugged the original hard drive
> to keep it out of harm's way (and to avoid any possible confusion
> for the installer). Then I deleted all the partitions I was
> experimenting with on the SSD, and did a fresh install. WOW!
> Was that ever fast! A complete install in 5 minutes or less!
> And booting is also lightning-fast.
>
> But, as I expected, all my stuff is gone. Well, sort of.
> I plugged the hard drive back in, and all my files are
> there. But there are no icons left on the desktop - no
> more Portal, and none of the utilities I downloaded were
> on my $PATH.
Linux's libraries and dependencies from your old installs of your "utilities" are likely to be very different to your new Linux environment.
I recommend finding current Debian (i.e. Bookworm?) packaged versions, and if they are not in Debian packages, then downloading the Utilities from their respective web sites (if they offer installation instructions for the Debian environment. If these too were not possible, I personally would give up using the "utilities", and where possible finding something that kind of does what they did. Not knowing what your utilities are that you used to run, I can only make broad suggestions, and sorry if some of those "utilities" are very important to you. For me, I give up and move on quicker that some, even if I really miss them. All the best in your efforts, I hope you succeed !
>
> How do the rest of you deal with all the user-added stuff
> that vanishes when you do a fresh install? Are there some
> tricks I can use, rather than painstakingly re-installing
> all my utilities one by one? I assume you can just copy
> the old /home over to the new drive (although in my case
> I'll be leaving the big music and video directories on the
> spinning rust, to be accessed at a new mount point that I'll
> add to /etc/fstab).
If you had spare space, I would be tempted to put a copy of the videos/music that I liked, to the new NVMe. Speed and ease of use. I would keep the HD as a backup.
BTW: I still think HDs have less chance of dying and/or loosing data that SDD (inc NVMe SSDs).
>But that does nothing about all the
> nifty utilities that were in (e.g.) /usr/bin (even though
> the configuration files are probably in /home).
I would not recommend copying over hidden folder config files unless they were for a specific "utility" that you used to use. I have found conflicts between new installations with configuration files of older installations due to programs changing the way they store their own configurations/data.
Even if it means setting things up again, and the waste of time that takes, I prefer to have a stable environment as my first priority. Stability even triumphs over my laziness.
>
> For now, though, the box is sort of running. And man, is it
> a speed demon. Once again, thanks for the assistance.
I hope for a nice stable, fast, and reliable Debian system for you (with programs that do what you used to do, whether that be the same utilities you used to use, or some kind of replacement program.
George.
>
> --
> /~\ Charlie Gibbs | Life is perverse.
> \ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | It can be beautiful -
> X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | but it won't.
> / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Lily Tomlin
>
>
Reply to: