Re: transferring boot
Hi Eben,
[2TB HDD booting MBR to 256G SSD booting UEFI]
On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 01:41:19PM -0400, Eben King wrote:
> eben@cerberus:~$ lsblk
> NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
> sda 8:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
> └─sda1 8:1 0 238.5G 0 part
> sdb 8:16 0 1.8T 0 disk
> ├─sdb1 8:17 0 953M 0 part /boot
> ├─sdb2 8:18 0 2G 0 part /
> ├─sdb3 8:19 0 20G 0 part /usr
To be honest I think I would probably just move some stuff to the SSD
and carry on booting MBR mode.
0. Have backups.
1. From single user mode or a live environment (even the "rescue" mode
from the Debain install medium) rsync the contents of /, /boot and
/usr to the single sda1 partition.
2. grub-install /dev/sda
3. Adjust /etc/fstab to mount / from sda1 and comment out /boot and
/usr.
4. Reboot the computer, making sure that the SSD appears first in the
boot order.
If it doesn't work for some reason, revert step 3 and then boot with
the HDD as first in the boot order to be back where you started.
This moves the majority of your OS to the SSD. It still boots in MBR
mode.
I don't see any advantage to changing a working system from MBR to UEFI
booting unless there is specific need. I'd do that at next reinstall.
> ├─sdb7 8:23 0 30G 0 part /misc/export
> ├─sdb8 8:24 0 130G 0 part /misc/media
> ├─sdb9 8:25 0 165G 0 part /misc/mp3
> ├─sdb10 8:26 0 74G 0 part /misc/torrent
> ├─sdb11 8:27 0 9G 0 part /home
> ├─sdb12 8:28 0 75G 0 part /misc/scratch
> └─sdb13 8:29 0 48G 0 part [SWAP]
> sdc 8:32 0 238.5G 0 disk
> ├─sdc1 8:33 0 5.1G 0 part /var/cache
> └─sdc2 8:34 0 182.7G 0 part /misc/iso
You may also consider getting this part of /var and also swap onto SSD.
As a side note I would find this amount of partitions to juggle to be
really unwieldy. What do you do when one of them fills up and you can't
easily resize it because of the other partitions before and after it on
the disk?
If separate mount points are truly necessary then I recommend using some
form of volume management so that resizing later is easy.
> No idea what sdd is:
"lsblk -o +model,vendor" may give more idea, as may "smartctl -i
/dev/sdd".
Thanks,
Andy
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https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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