So, I’m trying to clone an SSD to an NVME drive and I’m bumping into this “dev-disk-by” error when I boot from the NVME (the SSD is unplugged).
I can’t find anyone talking about this in this context. It seems like what I’ve done here should be fine and should work, but there’s clearly something I and the arch wiki are missing.
I did this recently, and encountered exactly the same issue. I can’t say whether it’s the same root cause, but it might be.
The device ID for the efi or boot partition may change, and in this case you have to make certain you hunt down every reference to it and update it. IIRC in my case it was in a config file for dracut, and I cottoned on when I upgraded the kernel and got back in the hung mode.
If you know the old blkid, do a deep search in both your efi partition as well as /etc and make sure you’ve changed to the new device UUIDs.
Very interesting. I wasn’t finding anywhere what the device ID was. Everything was looking like it was copied over from where I was (at least noticing).
Clonezilla seems to have taken care of the necessary updates so if you do this again I’d recommend just using that. I hate that it’s yet another special ISO tool to keep around on a USB thumb drive, but if I’d used that from the start several hours of my life would’ve been saved 😅
In my case, it was just too many technology changes from what I was used to, and simply wasn’t familiar enough with. It doesn’t help that every distro seems to do everything slightly differently, rather than just agreeing on a standard. The egotistical NIH may be the most frustrating thing about distro builders.
EFI and dracut are both novel to me; efi I’m starting to become more comfortable with, but dracut is new and I’m not entirely sure how it works and where it puts all of its config stuff. It’s still better than systemd-boot, which was mostly a catastrophe for me; it worked fine until you wanted to draw outside of the lines a little and then you discover a mountain of spaghetti. I probably should have just stayed with grub, but I wanted snapshot booting, and grub is beginning to struggle with some of these new modalities.
Anyway, I don’t want to have to rely on a custom specialized distro, and I figured out my problem in a couple of days; I only have to screw it up two or three more times and then I’ll be comfortable with it :-)