u/jatenk

I‘m in an open workshop, and we want to upgrade our laptops to SSDs to make giving workshops and general work faster and more smoothly. It‘s just 128GB SSDs, but for our purposes, that‘s large enough, especially since we want to set up the machines fresh anyway to get rid of years of communal use clutter.

I set up one Linux Mint machine cleanly with all software we need and cloned that hard drive to my own Macbook, then copied that disk image to another of the SSDs (via terminal dd command). That worked nicely - the clone SSD works perfectly in the same computer. Unfortunately, neither the clone, nor the originally set up SSD work in any other computer, even ones with the same model (Fujitsu E754). On boot, media read turns up a failure, no bootable drive is found, and yes, I changed the boot order in the BIOS menu and selected the correct drive. The problem is identical between trying to boot from the internal SATA interface and booting from USB (via an adapter).

Apparently, the disk image clone retains information about the specific, unique laptop it was set up on. Especially for identical models, that can‘t be that much information, right? Would it be possible somehow to edit the disk image to make it work on any of the other computers?

If not - what‘s my fastest, and more importantly infinitely reproducible, alternative? Right now it‘s only four computers we‘re setting up, but we have 12, and the others will follow at some point; at best, we keep one clean disk image that we then use for any future new computer setup. That can‘t be a pure Linux image though - that wouldn‘t include all of the software we need in the workshop, some of which isn‘t trivial to acquire and install. Would it be possible to go through a standard Linux install process, so installing from a bootable USB drive, but use the customized disk image instead of the clean image you‘d download through the instruction manuals?

The one thing that irked me a little bit about this otherwise fantastic movie is that I feel like it could‘ve hit even harder if we never distinctly found out whether he actually used to be part of the crime syndicate or not. They could’ve made a strong statement about the violence people get compelled to do just through circumstances, and that violence needs no context or reason to be what it is. Those are statements the movie is already making, but by removing that one distinct factor about his motivation, I felt they could‘ve hit that message home even harder.

And much wouldn‘t even have had to change - he could still be highly skilled; it would suggest that he has a background of some kind, but ultimately, that doesn‘t really matter, does it? The point is the nature of violence, and that’s the same no matter who does it or why, which once again is one major point of the movie. In the end, never quite knowing whether he genuinely was the one they thought he was or not would have mirrored the wife‘s conflict and put us into her shoes as a result, and we would‘ve realised that he might or might not have been; he was capable of these things either way, and is still the same person today no matter the circumstances.