> On 17 Jan 2025, at 00:00, Curtis Maurand <curtis@???> wrote:
>
>>
>> Is this old computer running BIOS or UEFI? If it’s UEFI you would need to boot some sort of live environment on a USB stick to reinstall grub. Something like https://www.supergrubdisk.org/ would do it.
>>
> I’ll bear that in mind. dd should also copy the boot sector and all the partitions. the current system is running bios. i don’t see much advantage to using uefi apart from disks greater than whatever bios limits are.

That should work for bios I guess. I seem to recall that uefi stores the boot info somewhere else on motherboard and not on the first disk like bios does.

If you’re using dd you would want to ensure that both source and destination disks are exactly the same size or else you will get partition table problems like not using all available space on the new disk if it’s bigger.

I’m guessing clonezilla may be slightly faster than dd as it claims to only save and restore used blocks on the disk.

https://clonezilla.org/

Tom