Re: UEFI grub install fails
On Thu 21 Aug 2025 at 02:03:20 (-0700), Van Snyder wrote:
> On Wed, 2025-08-20 at 23:21 -0700, David Christensen wrote:
> > On 8/20/25 21:34, Van Snyder wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2025-08-20 at 23:15 -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > > > But if the OP is intent upon converting the disk, a more manual
> > > > approach,
> > >
> > > I'm the OP. Dell told me that there's a Windoze 10 product key
> > > burned
> > > into the MB. They said to download a Win 10 installer and it would
> > > register automagically. So I backed up /home, used gparted to
> > > change
> > > the disk from MBR to GPT (which blew away the partition table),
> > > installed Windoze (which took the whole disk without asking),
> > > shrank it
> > > using gparted, installed Debian 13, restored /home — and it didn't
> > > boot. So I reinstalled Debian 13 and the grub installer figured out
> > > how
> > > to set up booting correctly. It only took me about twelve hours.
> >
> >
> > I am glad it worked out for you. :-)
>
> I asked the gparted maintainers towork out a way to comvert MBR to GPT
> and preserve the patitions and patition table. They said that ever OS
> has a different boot program, which they probably couldn't recover. I
> told them that that would at least me to run a rescue disk and re-run
> grub=update. This would be much faster than the dance I had to do.
> Maybe they'll do it.
My partitioning tool of choice is gdisk.
I've used gdisk in the past to convert MBR to GPT in order to test
whether GPT would work in old hardware dating from the early 2000s:
gdisk has the advantage that it can convert GPT disks back to MBR,
though happily it turned out not to be necessary for these machines.
Of course, they were running linux; hence my ignorance about restoring
Windows' ability to boot after GPT conversion.
For shrinking Windows partitions, I've always used Windows' own tools,
mainly Disk Manager but also things called System Protection, Disk
Cleanup and Disk Defragment (for deleting "checkpoints" and moving
"unmovable" files).
Cheers,
David.
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