#technotes — Public Fediverse posts

Another oddity:

"mbr2gpt /convert /allowFullOS" command also won't work if the disk has more than three partitions.

I had to delete an extra recovery partition that wasn't needed in order to be able to run the conversion successfully. I have no idea why more than three partitions on the disk will cause it to fail.

#technotes #windows

RT: https://social.retroedge.tech/objects/27c0e4d6-1be9-472e-be5c-ee7354eb26c2

I had to fix a Windows EFI partition with gparted. The original was not large enough and formatted in FAT16. I replaced it with a larger partition formatted in FAT32.

However, Windows still wouldn't recognize it.

The solution was that I had missed the "esp" and "boot" flags. I set those in gparted and tried again. This time Windows recognized it.

#technotes #Windows #gparted

Using these notes again, at least some parts of them, to upgrade an older ASUS K53E laptop. It had a very slow hard disk drive, 4GB memory and on legacy boot. Upgraded to an SSD, 8GB memory and did the conversion to uefi boot (had to manually enter the UEFI boot path in the BIOS - \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Bootmgfw.efi - to get it to boot).

The owner wanted to keep using it to "keep it out of the landfill". After the upgrades, it is still not a great laptop, but will be much better performance than it had before and will meet her needs.

#upgrades #Windows #technotes

RT: https://social.retroedge.tech/objects/4060b69d-74d7-4501-b3b3-cb839a7c2400

Doing another one of these System Migrations today. This one is slightly easier, especially since I have my #TechNotes to look back on.

A reminder: always run chkdsk within Windows after using gparted to resize the "c: drive" partition.

The "mbr2gpt /convert /allowFullOS" command wouldn't work until I did that, as the file system didn't recognizance it had been resized until I ran chkdsk. It gave this error: "cannot find room for the efi system partition"

After running chkdsk, mbr2gpt convert went fine, as I had resized the "c: drive" partition to be smaller and have free, unallocated space at the end of the drive.

#Windows

RT: https://social.retroedge.tech/objects/4060b69d-74d7-4501-b3b3-cb839a7c2400

It seems that I am becoming experienced with migrating very old Windows 10 installations on older hardware to newer hardware and then upgrading them to Windows 11.

The whole process is time consuming. Sometimes it is fairly easy, sometimes there's a whole lot of things that need to be done.

The one I am working on now was originally on an HP Pavilion desktop PC with a 1st Gen Intel i3 processor.

Had to convert SATA mode from RAID to AHCI.

To get a CloneZilla clone of the system, I had to fix an MBR GPT mismatch by deleting the GPT info, as this Windows 10 install was Legacy boot, not yet UEFI.

sgdisk -z /dev/sda (where sda is the drive to remove the GPT info from)

Did a full backup using Samsung Data Migration to a Samsung SATA SSD before that, just in case that operation caused data loss or a problem.

Then resized and moved partitions using gparted.

I planned on restoring the CloneZilla image to an nvme drive, not a SATA drive (as it was originally). So in order for Windows to be prepared for that, and not get an "inaccessible device" error, I ran this command in Windows right before making an image:

sc.exe config stornvme start= boot

Then got a CloneZilla image. Cloned it to another machine that could do both legacy and uefi boot (the original machine could only do legacy).

After all that, the commands to convert from legacy to uefi boot didn't work because there was no recovery partition. I had to copy the winre.wim file from another Windows installation (got it from another customer computer that I have currently with Windows 10).

Had to put that winre.wim file in C:\Windows\System32\Recovery - then run "reagentc /enable" to enable the recover environment.

Then this command worked:

mbr2gpt /convert /allowFullOS

It would not before enabling the recovery environment.

Next step is rebooting the machine in UEFI mode and making sure the Windows 10 installation has, in fact, been converted from mbr to gpt.

When that is done, I can run the upgrade process from Windows 10 to Windows 11 using an installer created by the rufus disk creator utility that bypasses the hardware checks Windows 11 normally has.

After a successful upgrade, I can finally move it to the newer computer that the customer purchased from me.

#Windows #Windows10 #Windows11 #CloneZilla #TechNotes

Note:

I just changed a Windows 10 installation from SATA mode: RAID to AHCI.

First, within Windows command prompt (as admin):

bcdedit /set safeboot minimal

Then shutdown. Start the computer, enter into BIOS and change the SATA mode from RAID to AHCI. Save BIOS settings.

Reboot. Windows will start in safe mode. Then, within Windows command prompt (as admin):

bcdedit /deletevalue safeboot

Restart your computer again. Windows 10 should now boot normally with AHCI drivers enabled.

#windows #windows10 #sata #TechNotes