Thinkpads Forum

I recently cloned my main hard drive on my T61 (from a 256GB Micron SSD to a 240GB Sandisk SSD, in case it matters) with a linux Mint partition on it but when I tried to boot either the cloned or original drive on my two T520s (one with the nvidia gpu, one with the intel gpu), it apparently doesn't recognize the boot sector, or grub2, or something. (No error messages either.) However when I insert these same drives on my older machines (T60, T61, T500), they boot with no problem -- I see the same grub2 menu as on the original drive. I've tried using Ubuntu boot-repair, rescatux, and testdisk, but still have the same problem.

Has anyone else experienced this before? Any ideas what might be happening?? I've also tried experimenting with some of the T520 BIOS settings (legacy boot first, etc), but to no avail. And a quick search of the forum didn't turn up anything directly relevant -- closest thread might be this one in the linux section: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=121570.

Check if boot is set UEFI mode, legacy BIOS or compatibility mode. If it is UEFi then it does not boot without proper UEFI install?

RistoE wrote:Check if boot is set UEFI mode, legacy BIOS or compatibility mode. If it is UEFi then it does not boot without proper UEFI install?

Already had tried that, unfortunately no luck there.
I should also mention that a live USB with the same version of LM boots just fine. So I thought there might simply be a corrupt boot sector on the cloned partition etc, hence my (unsuccessful) experimenting with the rescue/repair programs I mentioned. After the repairs were applied I was still able to boot on the older machines just fine. Very puzzling (and frustrating!)

Quick update, in case anyone else experiences this problem...
I've found a simple workaround: When cloning the source HDD I set the partition table to MSDOS on the target drive (instead of GPT), then copied the source drive partitions that I wanted. The cloned drive now boots up and works perfectly fine -- but it's not an ideal solution since I still can't boot the source drive on this T520 (ugh).

Apparently this has been an issue ever since Lenovo introduced UEFI booting capability -- and it's not clear to me if it ever got resolved. See here for instance: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Linux-Disc ... d-p/555317 and http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/bios.html.