I’m getting a new laptop today that comes without a hard drive/ssd, and was just planning to move over my ssd with my tumbleweed install. Thought this would be a very common situation, but haven’t found much info on it (or just very old results). Wanted to check if doing this would be too much of a hassle (dealing with grub configuration, mount points, etc…), or if I can naively expect things to boot without much work. Laptop I’m getting is a framework 13, it should work pretty well with any recent kernel and the open source AMD drivers.
As this is the same disk with all information about it (partitioning, mount points, etc.) on there should not be any problem with that. But you must check for the hardware, e.g. if you now have NVidia where you earlier hadn’t …
Check also that both laptops are booting the same way (likely both on UEFI these days) and if the older one is installed via legacy boot check on the new one if that is still possible, maybe via a compatibility setting in the firmware (aka BIOS).
Then if the video systems are different you may still be able to boot to a terminal (just hit E for Edit at the GRUB screen and append 3 to the line beginning with “linux”) and then install /uninstall what drivers might be needed.
Does this framework13 support the SSD type from your old? It’s possible that a nice new thin lightweight may support NVME, but not 2.5" SATA, just a thought.
@hccv is right, you should uninstall NVidia’s drivers before moving, then reinstall after. Or if you forget, and the new has not NVidia, make your first boot by appending a 3 to the linu line in the bootloader before proceeding, thus booting into multi-user mode to install or remove as necessary. Possibly in addition to 3 you may need also nomodeset.
Thanks for the help everyone, given these recommendations I went ahead with the swap (both were M2 drives so all was good, both had UEFI on). After some nvidia driver purging in the terminal everything is working nicely, just noticed that I had my swap space in a different drive so will still need to do a full reinstall and repartition a bit later on (good excuse to clean up my system as well).
A swap space is not essential and it can be implemented via a swap file stored elsewhere, so no real need for a reinstall. Or, depending on your disk layout, you may be able to shrink another partition.
Anyway you have to edit the /etc/fstab file and comment out / remove the line mentioning “swap” to have a clean boot process.
I have the Framework 16 here, its pretty solid especially being Linux friendly 100%, so you will love your Framework 13 for sure. You can dump the SSD into a zstd compressed image, then restore the image to the new NVME drive via USB NVME adapter, then run gparted to expand your partition size if needed. I swapped from a NVIDIA based Alienware to the F16 (AMD graphics) by putting my nvme into the new laptop, I didn’t need to do anything, even if the nvidia packages are installed, the actual driver is simply not going to load since the GPU doesn’t get detected. After you boot the F13, you can purge them then.