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

[Robert Furber]

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.

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.

By the way, I am curious as to why you put /scratch (swap?) on your SATA 
SSD and not on your NVMe SSD.

RF