Hi everyone,

I have a Surface Go 1 with 128 gb hooked up to a usb-c screen.

I’ve installed Fedora 38 on it and I’m really happy with the whole setup. So much so that I wanted to be able to reproduce it on all my computers.

The problem is I can’t get the machine to boot from a Usb-a with usb-c adaptor or from a usb-c stick.

I’ve tried everything. I can access the uefi settings and disable secure boot and change the boot order. At first I thought it was because I was using an usb-c adapter but buying a usc-c stick didn’t change a thing.

In the past the only way I was able to boot from usb was to break my system, install windows again and go to windows recovery. I don’t want to do that again as I would want to clone my system.

For now, I’ve resorted to cloning my girlfriend’s 2012 MacBook Pro with Fedora on it, but since it’s not my daily driver, it’s not where I’m creating my perfect setup.

If anyone can help me, I’d be really grateful.

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    3·
    10 months ago

    There are a bunch of options most are kind of complicated. As mentioned here before ventoy will get clonezilla running from a network boot. Without clonezilla, a few things I can think of are:

    #1 just clone the system while it’s running. Get a large external drive and sudo dd if=/dev/your_internal_disk of=/path/to/disk/image.img

    If you want you can boot into single user mode to do this, it’s will be less risky and you may be able to mount root read only. Note that this carries no risk for the source machine if dd is used correctly, only that the filesystem of a target machine may have to be repaired after the clone.

    If you’d rather just clone partitions that would work this way as well.

    The target machine would need a live bootable is to copy the disk image onto the target disk. Dd is a inefficient option but it’s on almost every system. Use partclone instead of you can, same as clonezilla uses.

    #2 expose your disks with network block devices. You’ll need kernel support I think, but then it’s basically the same as #1 but you can do the clone from a remote machine

    #3 build empty filesystems on the other machines just copy all of the files. You can use nfs or samba but it would probably be better to tar everything to preserve file ownership and permissions using these protocols. Rsync would probably be best. after copying the files a bootloader would need to be installed and configured.