Oh, fun fact. All this happened because I found this comment:
It was about that card:
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B0897XXRXT/ref=ox_sc_act_image_1?smid=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB&psc=1
2 Likes
That’s odd. I use my USB3 ports almost exclusively and haven’t had any issues. I use them wth thumb drives, external SSD’s and HDD’s and an external DVD-ROM.
I’m using Arch (ArcoLinux).
Is it possible that it could partly be a hardware issue with the motherboard you have?
1 Like
Hmm … interesting. I’ll reboot this weekend and give it a go. Had a few USB oddities over the years which I’ve generally put down to having some really weird USB devices (pen testing tools).
1 Like
I can confirm both Arch Linux and Arch Linux ARM don’t have a setting for USB3 that causes an issue. Sounds like a debian problem.
1 Like
Considering it’s a no-name “Gateway” all-in-one computer with a no-name… like “SX1234” motherboard, it is 110% possible.
(No it’s not an “Aliexpress” or “Wish” computer, Gateway is/was, at least, owned by Acer for a while, I think).
1 Like
This needs to be here.
3 Likes
Man, rsync “–info=progress2” is as reliable as the windows file transfer “estimated time remaining”.
Went from 95% to 56% then from 95% to 85% the two times I was watching, currently switching between 25 minutes remaining and 10 seconds remaining.
Flawless otherwise, but lol, this could be better.
2 Likes
If you wonder if it’s possible, on linux, to change system drives, copying the entirety of it, yes, it works. And it’s magnificent.
Just get a liveCD and:
sudo rsync -axHAWXS --numeric-ids --info=progress2 /old/drive /new/drive
That’s the first time ever I change system drives without having to… reinstall linux, or windows, or reinstall programs, or applications, or backgrounds, or re-do thousands of settings… It’s like I haven’t done anything – but all my stuff is in my new drive now. All is just fucking “teleported”.
It’s one thing to just backup your files, but your entire system? Holy shit. 
2 Likes
Looks good, i just got linux running on and old macbook, gonna try out this player
1 Like
So if you are running a PC with Windows, just make a bootable USB with Linux and you can use that to migrate your whole system to a new drive? That would be really nice.
Just to note that rsync doesn’t copy “drives” but “filesystems” or more specifically directories; it may well work to duplicate a system drive in some circumstances but if you want to duplicate a drive (which would include the partition table so you’ll need to re-edit that on the new drive afterwards) something like -
dd if=/dev/old-disk of=/dev/new-disk status=progress
Might be preferable. You might want to add something like “bs=128M” to the end of the command to speed it up a bit.
[There might be gooey ways of doing this too, but I’m too old school to bother]
2 Likes
I actually remembered afterwards, I did not use rsync, I did not even use the command line, I simply made a 200gb “.img” file of my system drive via “gnome-disk-utility”. As easy as that.
(…but gnome-dsik-utility was probably just doing dd if=/dev/disk of=file.img, lol)
I might need to re-edit the partition, because I simply put the 200gb .img into a 250gb drive, but… I don’t even care for now. It’s a linux system drive. When will I ever hit 200gb, lol.
Yup. I’m not sure how Windows will “react” to that, though. There might be some silly protection like “we have detected this is not the same hard drive and do not know what to do”. 
Pff. I knew something was wrong. I used my Sanskrit 10th for a while using an hdmi-to-coax box. Plugged it in via USB a week ago because said box decided to stop being compatible with my new graphics card.
I had everything at 48khz before. I used alsa and set everything to 44100, for whatever reason…
I found a video on the net to tune something (new) today, and realized the tuner in the video did not match the tuner on my smartphone. If you set ALSA to 44100, it doesn’t “downsample” 48000hz data, it alters the pitch to force 44100 to the DAC.
2 Likes
Windows will allow a certain number of changes to a system before it needs reactivation. This is a policy that is dictated by Microsoft servers, as in, the number of hardware differences or the type of hardware change.
A hard disk change should be OK though.
1 Like
It will clone a disk sector by sector and ensure that it’s bootable and has every single thing on it that the original one had, BUT this is not a great way to clone things to SSDs, because dd also copies all the 0 values in the empty space sections and performs write operations for them. No SSD likes to have every single sector on it written to in one big “let’s wear this thing out as much as possible and shorten its lifespan” operation. 
A somewhat better solution is to open GParted when you’re on your bootable stick, unmount all partitions on the source and destination disk, wipe the destination disk and just copy&paste all the partitions from the source one by one. When you do that GParted knows not to waste time on the 0 sections and finishes faster and with less wear. And if this means more than 4 primary partitions, make sure the partition table type on the destination is GPT (older MBR/MS-DOS type partition tables don’t support arbitrary numbers of primary partitions).
The limitation with GParted is that I’ve come across partition types that it wouldn’t offer the copy-paste operation for, or couldn’t even unmount (like some of the partitions you get when you create a bootable Ubuntu stick with persistence, so you can install stuff and it stays on there after you power off, unlike the simple Ubuntu Live where nothing is saved). So the next method I ended up with, though I thought I could avoid it, was a specialized disk cloning program, in my case CloneZilla.
The main website keeps talking about creating a special CloneZilla stick, but actually you can just add CloneZilla to an existing live+persistence USB installation you have - you just need to “sudo apt install clonezilla”, it’s in the repos.
So far my only hangup with it is that I cloned my main OS to a separate disk using 4096 MB image file splitting, but when I try to copy that image to another backup drive my main Ubuntu says “could not open file” on any of the large image files. No clue what’s happening there, I will just redo the cloning directly to the other drive I guess (wanted to avoid it at first because that’s a slower external drive that only has a USB connection).
Also, I like this.
2 Likes
I took my old Thinkpad X201 out for the first time in months today and decided to get rid of Budgie 20.04 and put Mint 20.1 on it. Apparently Cinnamon changed over to using lipinput for touchpads since the last time I had that DE on the machine and of course now there’s no edge scrolling functionality to be had.
A quick search revealed at least a couple dozen results of people complaining about the same thing with recent libinput killing edge scrolling that previously worked with Synaptic drivers. I get a vibe that it’s fixable by manually hacking out libinput and replacing it with Synaptic drivers. I’ll be damned if I feel like spending the time researching that and doing it though. [Sigh…]
Oh Linux, even if it’s just an AirSoft gun, why do you have to shoot yourself in the foot like this?
I hear Mint and assume there is a problem between keyboard and chair.
Recently however, I discovered Arch stopped putting the kernel in the base package group on install.
You’re probably right; I’m not a great disk cloner - on the rare occasions it’s necessary, I’d rather re-install. Or install to a new disk (my old Debian install is still mounted as /old on this machine).
On the other hand, for a one-off clone it’s probably okay - unless you’re doing a disk clone every week for years, you’re unlikely to significantly damage an SSD (a random Samsung consumer drive I checked is specced for 0.3 drive writes per day for an unspecified length of time ). Unless you’ve got a really “hot” disk (slog drive for a really busy server, database log device where you get millions of writes a day) it probably isn’t worth worrying about too much.
2 Likes