[GTALUG] Swapping ThinkPad drive

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I've bought a 1 TB SSD drive to replace the 750 GB drive in my ThinkPad.  I
| was considering using the opportunity to change to UEFI.  I'll be mounting the
| old drive in an external case so that I can copy over the partitions, one of
| them NTFS.

Superstitious mode:

Does your HDD have a block size larger than 512 bytes?  Likely.

Many USB<->SATA devices seem to present 512-byte blocks to the computer.

That may confuse things.

On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong.

|  Anything I should worry about in converting to UEFI?  Any
| suggestions?

There are generally two conversions involved:

- old fashioned partitioning (MBR vs GUID)

- old fashioned booting (BIOS vs UEFI)

It is possible to do these separately.  Even though BIOS only boots from 
something it thinks is MBR, Linux distros can and do create 
GUID-partitioned disks that have a fake MBR at the start.

Personally, I have done clean installs for these transitions.  Clean 
installs are easy and they tend to result in a cleaner system.  
Superstition again.