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lmao my plan to quadruple the storage space on my pc is being thwarted by the fact the usb nvme ssd dock i bought only has a usb-c connector

i'm… gonna have to use my gf's laptop to do the ssd cloning ahahaha

turns out in 2024 having a computer with only usb-a ports is a liability. all my adapters and hubs only go in the usb-a to usb-c direction. i never thought it would happen!

‪like to me usb-c is still that thing you have on laptops and usb-a is the Serious one, and i do not buy hubs with usb-c ports on them because everything i want to connect is usb 2.0 or, rarely, usb 3.0‬

‪next hurdle: why does my ubuntu usb flash drive crash every time i try to boot it on my gf's laptop?‬

‪answer: it has an nvidia gpu. log in with x windows instead of wayland. lmfao‬

‪oh shit you can pass 'status=progress' as an argument to dd and it'll actually give you periodic transfer status updates i wish i knew this before‬

‪1TB (932GiB) copied in 2306s, that's not bad‬

advantages of this ship-of-theseus'd disk content being MBR: dd'ing the old ssd to the new one Just Works

disadvantages: this new ssd is 4TB. guess what the max size for an MBR partitioned disk is??? (it's less,,,,)

followed the first four steps of https://askubuntu.com/a/1315273 to convert the MBR disk to GPT (windows's tool for this refuses to do it on a non-empty disk), let's see if this hosed the windows install; hoping startup repair can fix it

@hikari You'll have to recreate the Windows bootloader if you used gdisk (Windows has a tool that can convert MBR to GPT which also automatically writes the new bootloader – it's called mbr2gpt, and you can run it from install media).

What you need to do:

• first make an EFI system partition (ESP) and format it to FAT32, it should be 100-300 MB in size; then boot any recent Windows install medium, and once it's booted press Shift+F10 – this will give you a command prompt.
• run diskpart, type lis dis (which will list all disks in your machine), then sel dis X (replace X with your NVMe drive number); lis par (shows partitions), sel par X (replace X with ESP number), assign (assigns a drive letter to ESP, since it doesn't have it by default); lis vol (lists drive letters, you should now see which drive letter is your Windows partition, and which drive letter is ESP); exit (return to cmd.exe)
• verify Windows partition drive letter with dir Y:
• finally write the Windows bootloader with bcdboot Y:\windows /s Z: /f UEFI (Y: is your Windows partition, Z: is your ESP)
• reboot with wpeutil reboot, and Windows should now boot

@jernej__s that probably would've worked! but i'm doing my own weird thing now instead

@hikari You can format from diskpart – after the partition is selected, format fs=fat32 quick.