Curtis Maurand said on Fri, 24 Jan 2025 11:11:59 -0500

>Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Jan 24, 2025, at 8:00 AM, Tom <wirelessduck@???> wrote:
>>
>> 
>>
>>
>>>> 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/
>>
>
>I’m familiar with clonezilla. I also have a copy pf true image
>somewhere. Once I have the partitions copied, I can use gparted to
>resize the partition the grow the filesystem to occupy it.
>
>—Curtis

Hi Curtis and Tom and everyone else,

If you use dd, I suggest using ddrescue with a log, so it handles any
bad inodes as well as possible. Curtis, I think you're right, you can
use gparted to grow a partition, using unused space *immediately after
the partition to be grown*. If the original has a gap between two
partitions, IMHO you can't use it to grow the one after the gap, but I
could be wrong.

Growing a partition is a risky operation, so the time to do it is
immediately after the ddrescue, not after the new disk has been used.

In the past, I've used stranded space by making it into a partition.
With today's spectacular, wonderful, marvelous, heck, miraculous bind
mounts (I love bind mounts so much my wife is jealous), you can use
almost all that recovered space to add to the partition you wanted to
expand in the first place.

I've used Clonezilla. Not a fan. I'm not smart enough or careful enough
to get the job done the first four times I attempt it.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com