I tried to upgrade the HD in my laptop. The first thing that I did was to clone my old laptop drive to my new one using DD. I then installed the new drive, and it boots to grub but it wont boot all the way because it can’t find the root drive. I then booted a liveCD and took a look at the fstab and noticed that it used disk-by-id so I got the new disk ID and edited fstab, and tried to re-boot and it still could not find the root disk. Is there something else that I need to change in grub or something to get this to boot?
Your disk by id is probably still wrong. You didn’t need to edit menu.lst (did you remember this one?) and fstab manually, you could have booted to the repair system on the CD and it would have done the fix. One thing, the 11.1 repair system has a bug, it seems to indicate it failed in the repair but it actually has worked.
The other way is to edit menu.lst and fstab to use disk by path, e.g. /dev/sda2 for the time being, and then fix it up later once you have it running.
It could be useful you take a look to my last post, about cloning and resizing disk.
At begin I’ve got some failures, but the final result has succeeded:
You are using dd for something it is not intended to do
[despite what I consider to be a misguided ‘howto’ on these forums, defended ably by its author’s use of his moderator powers - and at the cost of giving me one of the worst site reputation ratings on this site for challenging his document]
oldcpu: Note this as another reason not to use dd for cloning.
I am not sure if there is a better way to do the upgrade than the way I did it, but it worked for me. I do see one odd thing though, my laptop will not boot now if I have the external USB drive connected. Does anyone have any idea what would cause this or how I could fix it? Grub complains that it can find my root drive. If I disconnect my USB drive the laptop boots up just fine.