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I'm preparing to upgrade my laptop from win10 to Linux (probably ubuntu).
In doing so I want to have a roll-back plan, so I have done a windows backup and recovery disk, and grabbed a copy of clonezilla on USB to clone the SSD for bare metal recovery...
this is where things start to get weird, and where I need some further suggestion...
system: Asus UX31A zenbook touch with 256GB ADATA XM11 (Sata3) SSD
clonezilla clonezilla-live-20170220-yakkety-amd64
When I boot to windows and look at the disk health, it shows everything is peachy, SMART shows no problems etc.
when I go to run clonezilla, mostly it fails to even find the SSD drive - sometimes it does, but then fails to see it when it comes time to read it.
when I drop to the command line, lsscsi can see the device, but can't get a response from it.
It looks like the device is available and ready right up to the point clonezilla attempts to access it, then it stops playing nice and even though it's still there, isn't accessible...
Any suggestions of known issues/bugs/workarounds I may have missed?
Location: Montreal, Quebec and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia CANADA
Distribution: Arch, AntiX, ArtiX
Posts: 1,364
Rep:
I have sometimes seen issues concerning SSD access that are related to the BIOS config. If you have a choice between AHCI and IDE (or PATA), it should be AHCI for SSD technology.
Location: Montreal, Quebec and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia CANADA
Distribution: Arch, AntiX, ArtiX
Posts: 1,364
Rep:
Hey bulwynkl,
.. I received some insight from another member who participated in the troubleshooting of a similar issue (thanks to jsbjsb001 :-).
In the other case, there were some unreadable sectors on the drive that were causing problems. The output from the following command may help us further diagnose with you:
booted a live Ubuntu (16.04) and was able to dd the disk to a file without issues, so from that PoV, the issue is resolved - but still no idea what occurred.
output from smartctl -a /dev/sda was, IIRC, something like "failed critical step: exit" or similar.
Using -T permissive or verypermissive gets past this, but then the output is essentially blank...
I'll have a go at it for completeness at some point but for now, I've achieved what I needed.
thanks all for the input.
for completeness, BIOS preference set to AHCI over ATA/IDE.
lsscsi sees the disk just fine, just can't read from it.
I was wondering if it's a device driver issue for that make and model of SSD...
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