[Hampshire] Migrate multi-boot system to new drive(s)?

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Author: Gordon Scott via Hampshire
Date:  
To: Hampshire LUG
CC: Gordon Scott
Subject: [Hampshire] Migrate multi-boot system to new drive(s)?
Hi all,

I have a multi-booting machine with xubuntu across several partitions
and Windows10 and it's other odd partitions on /dev/sda, I also have
AVL-MXE on /dev/sdb and some ext4 user-spaces on /dev/sdb, and I now
also have a Win10 snapshot on and external /dev/sdc, together with a
couple of ext4 workspaces, one of which is a copy of part of my ~/.wine
tree that has around a terrabyte of audio files (Band-in-a-Box).

It's also become a little spread about over time, where I've moved stuff
to new drives/partitions, expanded partitions and the like.

It feels like time to rationalise all this onto fewer drives and I'm
very tempted to make the new main drive a 2TB SSD, with a second
conventional hard drive for other storage.

I come therefore to deciding the best way to do this.

I imagine that I can pretty much just copy the Linux stuff to new
partitions on the new SSD and then run update-grub and grub-install onto
the new SSD and boot that SSD via EFI F12 or similar, before tidying up,
remove, replace and/or clear the old drives and run the grub stuff again.

But how can/does one best deal with the Win10 stuff?

I'm unsure how Win10 manages partitions or whether I can put NTFS
partitions into the extended area, or indeed what actually is the
"Microsoft reserved partition" that gparted reports as an unknown file
type. Unfortunately ditching Win10 is not an option as I still have one
application that I cannot run on Linux :-(

Another thought whilst I'm on this. Could I put that terrabyte of audio
files onto an ntfs partition, rather than ext4, so that I can access it
either from within ~/.wine as a mount or symlink, or as a windows drive?

Thoughts and/or advice, please.

Thanks.

              Gordon.


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