On 7/31/25 15:39, Andy Smith wrote:
Hi,
Hello. :-)
On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 02:31:44PM -0700, David Christensen wrote:<snip>When OP asks how to add a new SSD to their system and move their boot drive to it, it seems really excessive that you advise moving off hundreds of gigabytes of data, physically removing two other unrelated drives and then doing a complete reinstall. I guess we could all go to OP's home, rip everything out and rebuild it in our own desired way. Surely if they are wanting to reinstall Debian they wouldn't need to ask any of this and could just do it, UEFI boot and all, without needing to be told to back up and restore? Thanks, Andy
If I am doing my math correctly, the OP's 2 TB HDD has ~404 GB of content. I know of no easy way to make that fit onto a 256 GB SSD:
2025-07-31 23:31:20 dpchrist@laalaa ~$ perl -e 'print 802856+8146532+19419460+132468+122712680+43023296+156127788+46825720+7747788, $/'
404938588Taking a step back, putting the OS and the data on the same disk is a mistake. Once the OS is on its own disk and the data is on other disks, performance, system administration, maintenance, disaster preparedness/ recovery, etc., are all improved. The OP is at an opportune moment to do so with their computer, so I recommended it.
I had some Unix/ BSD/ Linux internals knowledge in the past, but today I simply *use* Debian. My strategy for success is to *keep it simple*. Perhaps a Debian expert could accomplish the feats of partitioning, bootloader, initramfs, grub, etc., surgery, transformation, and migration the OP seeks, but I am not that expert. So, I offered an alternative that is within the confines of my knowledge.
David