Helping someone upgrade from HDD to SSD on an older laptop. What I am trying to do is re-align C: from sector 63 to 4096. I used gparted via Linux to clone and then shuffle D: to 2M alignment which worked fine. Aligning and expanding C: worked fine also (as far as mounting via Linux etc), but the result won't actually boot after the alignment. I bet there's a magic command to reconfigure the MBR bootcode for the new C: partition location, yes? I just need to find a boot ISO that matches their OS version?
![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
How to move C: partition and have Windows still boot?
- Thread starter xorbe
- Start date
DrLobotomy
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- May 19, 2016
- Messages
- 6,736
fixboot /mbr possibly?
I actually had a 32b Vista dvd (wow lol that made my day), booted, clicked repair, bam everything works! Not my PC, just breathing life into a poor person's PC, it's all I can reasonably do. $8 ram (2x1GB) and $19 120gb ssd. Their PC was choking on 1x512M, it hurts to think that they suffered this entire time with that little memory. It had to use swap just to boot to the desktop. Put Firefox ESR 52.9.0 on there, and called it a day. Well, this was a blast from the past!
B00nie
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2012
- Messages
- 9,327
You should have put a linux desktop to that laptop instead of Vista. That was cruel and unusual punishment for them.
So you did a repair install overtop of the existing OS?
No, I kept the laptop's OS exactly the way I found it. I simply re-aligned/expanded the partitions because the 120gb ssd was slightly larger than the 100gb hdd, and ssd works best with aligned partitions. I had to do the CD "quick repair" (probably was fixboot /mbr) to get it to boot after the sector alignment. The guy is older and also not "all there" and doesn't use the computer much anyway, best to just keep things the way he knows to use it already. I think I should have skipped the ssd, as it was the 2x1gb ram that was the huge boost. The cpu is so slow that the ssd didn't help much. But hey, it's not gonna have sudden old laptop hdd death now, so that's good.
Last edited: