Changing a disc that has several partitions (NTFS or EXT4) from MBR to GPT format
Changing a disc that has several partitions (NTFS or EXT4) from MBR to GPT format
I haven’t spent much time exploring this, but I considered it recently. Would it be possible to create a GPT disk on the NVME storage, copy only the partitions there, update GRUB (or run a live boot repair and let it fix itself), and then everything work? If it sounds so easy, I might regret trying such a method. My challenge could be the fact that I have more than four partitions on an MBR disk—three for Ubuntu (OS, data, swap) and Windows, plus a leftover recovery partition for Windows. I suspect this complexity is why GPT fails, as many factors are involved. It might just be a matter of luck with gdisk too. Clearly, with GPT you wouldn’t need the three Ubuntu partitions in the container, which would make things much simpler.
I spent some time relaxing and figured things out. I made a disk GPT, transferred partitions to it, set up an efi boot partition, and added some space at the start of the drive. After that, I managed to boot GRUB and got Xubuntu running. Windows isn’t showing up for update-grub or os-prober, likely because it’s an old Windows 7 installation still in BIOS mode. I’m okay copying my data over and starting a fresh Windows 10 install there, then fixing GRUB again. I plan to clone this onto the NVME drive and test if it boots. Then I’ll move any needed files from the old Windows partition and do a Windows 10 install on the laptop so it picks up the product key correctly during setup. Best of luck!