On Wednesday 20 August 2025 17:23:21 dep via tde-users wrote: > My SSD for the ThinkPad arrived, so I pulled the drive from the machine and > using a separate machine to dd the contents of the existing drive onto the > new one. It being a 1-tb drive on both ends, it took a few hours. dd > reported success. > > I put the new SSD into the machine and booted it. I was happy to see it > booted readily. I was less happy to see what happened next. > > I got to the nice graphical login window. I typed in my password. Screen > went black with a mouse pointer, then after a few seconds returned to the > login screen. Damn, I thought. So I shut down and reinstalled the original > drive. > > And guess what? *Same thing*! Perfectly working installation has now lost > the contents of its /home partition. Only thing there is /lost+found. This > on the original drive, which dd shouldn't have touched at all. > > To say I am at a loss is an understatement. Everything else seems to work. > > Any informed guesses? Ever since my own bad experience with a brand-new, never-used SSD that I put in my brand-new, never-used laptop (hoping to bypass pre-installed Microsoft crap, etc.), I have avoided them. My own setup now is almost back to stone tools; that's how I dealt with it. I wonder, however, can you take out the SSD (both new and old), and use an SSD enclosure to read its contents with another machine. (There are some other gadgets that can read SSDs, but enclosures have their own power source.) If so, then maybe not all is lost, and maybe you do still have at least your dot folders. In my own case, this is more or less what I did, anyway. I only just managed to rescue the files I had saved on the SSD; then the very next time I tried to boot that SSD, I got the black screen with a blue rectangular box asking for a password (apparently, to open the SSD, which was not encrypted, at least not by myself). I managed to mount it once, as a separate external drive, using an enclosure attached to another screen, and I verified that I had rescued everything that I wanted. After that, I never could mount it again, and now it serves as a reminder never to buy SSDs, ever again, as I feel sure that they will come out with something newer and supposedly better, and I will fall for that trick again. If you have your dot folders, and they are intact, then you can copy them somewhere on another disk, then just do a regular installation. Then, copy over your saved dot files, and overwrite the defaults. Myself, that's pretty much always the way I do it, anyway. And I always save copies of my home folders, from my most recent working system, before I wipe everything and do a reinstallation. That way, even if my current home folder somehow gets corrupted, I can still do a fresh installation, and copy over an earlier home folder. I might lose a few recent items; but even there, I try to back up to a separate drive. This might not be quite what you want, but it might save your current home folder, or at least some of it. Good luck. Bill ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
