Re: replacing boot and only disk drive

[Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org>]

Pascal Hambourg a écrit :
> Hendrik Boom a écrit :
> 
>> Unless the MBR or something related to it contains information about the 
>> size of the entire disk, which will now be wrong.
> 
> 2) If Windows boots from UEFI, I suppose that the original disk
> partition table is in the GPT format. This format stores two copies of
> the GPT header, one at the beginning (primary header) and one at the end
> of the disk (secondary header). Each header has a pointer to the other,
> so in a way the primary header has a reference to the end of the disk
> where the secondary header is located. So, if you use dd to copy the
> whole disk, the secondary header will not be at the end of the new disk.
> Maybe tools such as gdisk can fix this.

Looking more carefully, there is more than just the address of the
secondary GPT header. The GPT header contains also the last usable
address for partitions which is near the end of the disk, just before
the secondary partition table. Also, the protective MBR contains a GPT
partition of the size of the disk - up to 2 TiB due to limitations of
the MBR partition table format.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table>

However, parted will detect that the disk is bigger than the partition
table reports and ask to fix it. gdisk allows to fix it too.