Comment by pmontra
3 months ago
My example: I installed Debian 13 recently. I installed on the second SSD of my laptop, so I can dual boot and keep working with Debian 11 on the first SSD.
I encrypt my disks. Debian 13 can use the hardware encryption of my Samsung SSD, 11 didn't. The installer offered me the option and I accepted it. That nearly bricked the SSD because of (I'm not totally sure) a mismatch between the block size of the file system and the block size required by the SSD encryption. The installer should have made a check and at least warned me. It did nothing of that and the laptop didn't boot. I couldn't even change the partitions on that disk. It enforced its encryption and refused to do anything. I appreciate that but it left me without my disk. I asked questions to either chatgtp or Claude, found the problem and after a few attempts I got the right sequence of commands to unblock the SSD and get an empty one. I reverted to the standard OS based encryption and all is well now. I would have had to dig deeply into forums and learn the meaning of those commands. AI saved me a lot of time. Is this a Linux only thing or a Windows installer would have made the same mistake? No idea.
No comments yet
Contribute on Hacker News ↗