On Wed, 11 May 2016 13:56:46 +0100 steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 11/05/16 12:42, Chris Walker wrote:
On Tue, 10 May 2016 22:00:26 +0100 Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 06:32:28PM +0100, Chris Walker wrote:
<sigh> Why is that when you want to register the new SSD on the Sandisk site, it asks for a serial number which is on the underside of the disc which is now securely bolted in and with the covers on the machine? :-(
You can usually pull the serial number for a drive from within linux using either hdparm or smartctl (you may need to install the smartmontools),
example:
sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda
Unfortunately, linux isn't yet installed on that machine and appears to be having problems doing so. It complains about miscalculation on the size of the Windows partition. As I don't want a /home partition on there, I thought I would create the partitions manually but even doing that it fails.
My next thought is to check the validity of the various partitions when I copied them over from the smaller SSD.
I've had joy with disk operations recently using the "USB Drive creator" to create a lightweight live installation of XUbuntu on a USB Hard disk and using that to run gparted to fix up the disk. You could try this (or with a USB stick), or a live CD, or a specific disk rescue system (testdisk and system rescue are I think two such).
(NB, using the USB disk creator, there's some sort of bug in the version I've got so it says "xyz is not a boot image" or something like that. To fix that, I just have to type live <enter> and then it boots.)
I grabbed a couple of programs yesterday for Windows but isodumper is available in Mageia5 (that's also what I'm running here) so once I buy myself a USB stick, I'll give that a go. I think I might also have a crack at generating some sort of install media for Windows, perhaps reinstalling the original 120GB SSD, so that I can build the system from scratch, just in case the original install done by my late friend was carried out in non UEFI mode. I can tell that from looking at the disc in Windows though - this page gives more information on that - https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_in_dual_boot_with_Windows8_and_over
There's also this page to help me with installing from USB - https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installation_Media#Dump_Mageia_ISO_on_a_USB_flash...