Thanks for responding, Greg!

On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 10:46:32PM -0700, Gregory Nowak via Dng wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 07:03:05PM -1000, Joel Roth via Dng wrote:
> > > Trying to get linux to boot on my new-used T14. This model
> > > has secure boot, came from Newegg with Windows installed.
>
> You might need to disable secure boot, but you won't know until you
> try to boot.
>
> > But hey, since I've got my devuan installation fully(?)
> > cloned, lets try booting while it's still in its T430 home.
>
> Good idea.
>
> > Short story. I could not get the cloned partition to boot! I
> > upgraded my daedalus and ran grub-install, confused about
> > which grub I had. Last try was definitely grub 2, okay, but
> > the i386-pc flavor. Is that used for an amd64 system?
>
> Yes.
>
>
> > I tried various USB boot disks with no success.
>
> You lost me. I thought you were booting a NVME disk.

Yes, when my attempts to boot the new system with
grub on the to-be-moved internal SSD failed, I turned to
various USB boot disks that I hoped would find
the cloned system. I tried a handful, including rEFInd,
supergrub boot and antix.

Confusing because I had /dev/sda and /dev/sdb
before, with linux on /dev/sdb1 and it was booting
fine. Perhaps the BIOS is set to legacy and since only /dev/sdb
has legacy boot configuration the MBR on /dev/sdb
gets control.

> > I did get as far as some failure around initrd
> > load time. (I seem to recall that initrd files
> > are portable, shouldn't be tied to a particular
> > partitioning.)
>
> As far as I know, yes.
>
> > At this point, I found the boot-info-script utility.
> > Output follows. I couldn't ask for more information,
> > and it's all in one place!!
> >
> > I'm mainly posting to let other folks know about it. However
> > I'm also groping for a useful procedure to follow getting
> > the system to boot. I'm ready to give up trying on the T430,
> > and just give it a go on the newer T14.
>
> You can try that, but the advantage of first booting on the old
> machine is you'll know your clone can be booted. If you still can't
> boot on the new machine, it will be a question of is there a problem
> with the clone, or something about the move to new hardware.

I do have two nvme drives, so surely one will work since
the T14 already boots its pre-installed windows.

> > My main innovation with this attempt is putting
> > UUIDs in /etc/fstab. This should be foolproof, right?
>
> Yes. The installer has already done this for a good while. You must be
> cloning a quite old system if your /etc/fstab doesn't already have
> uuid entries.

I've always administered /etc/fstab myself. I've upgraded,
not re-installed in probably decades. I do use UUIDs in
/etc/fstab, but perhaps from inertia, not for the
root file system.

> > Any suggestions, rants, etc. are welcome.

> Nothing else I can think of. If grub can load the kernel, it should
> also be able to load the initrd. Are you sure that's not an initramfs?
> You may need to rebuild the initramfs, if you have an initramfs once
> you move to the new machine. I don't recall what the case is with
> initrd, if they need to be rebuilt too, or not.

In /boot are numerous initrd.img-* files that go with matching kernels.
I'm reading that internally they are initramfs. I missed the
changeover.

Thank you for your reply.


--
Joel Roth