Improvements to laptop and installation of LM 19...

[ats4603]

Good afternoon

A bit of advice if I may?

My laptop is, frankly, in a bit of a mess. It is a Lenovo G505s with Windows 10 and LM 18.3 installed as dual boot. The (2TB) HDD is a bit "fragmented" with free space scattered all over the disk and it's pretty slow. What I have in mind is the following.

Replace the DVD drive with a SDD (I can't remember the last time I used the DVD drive); retain the HDD

Make backups of all data in the W10 and LM 18.3 areas to external drive(s)

Do a clean install of W10 on the SDD

Wipe the HDD

Create a NTFS partition on HDD for W10 data

Do a clean install of LM 19 to SDD, with /home on the HDD

Restore all data to the new setup.

So, a couple of questions...

Will this work???

I will use the LM 18.3 Backup Tool to make a backup of the LM data. This tool warns me that hidden folders are not included in the backup unless specified. Which files contain my preferences, passwords, history etc?

TIA

Andrew

[michael louwe]

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Please refer to ... https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2147295 (UEFI Installing - Tips; see Two Drives Install)
[For installing Linux on an external USB hard-drive, a workaround is to unplug the Win 8.x/10 internal hard-drive and install LM on the external USB hard-drive together with its bootloader = plug in the external USB hard-drive only when you want to boot LM.
....... The above workaround may also work for a 2 internal hard-drives desktop setup, ie after installation of LM, boot each OS via the Boot Menu of BIOS Setup by selecting the appropriate internal hard-drive as the 1st boot device]

Multi-drives install of LM alongside Windows is much easier in Legacy BIOS/MBR mode.

[ats4603]

OK, I have a "Plan B" for this... What I now propose is as follows:

Remove the DVD drive (which I never use) and put the 2TB HDD in its place (in fact I've done this bit, the laptop still works)

Take a Timeshift image of the existing 19 install; back=up all data files with Backups and copy all Windows data files to an external drive

Put a Samsung Evo 860 SSD (probably 250GB) in the space previously occupied by the HDD

Do a clean install of LM19, as follows

/ partition on SSD
/home partition at start of HDD (I intend to delete most of the Windows 10/Lenovo stuff from the HDD, including the EFI partition which I don't think I'll
need there?)
/swap partition at end of HDD

Restore the settings for LM19 from the Timeshift image; restore the LM19 data files from the Backups image

If the above is working OK, delete the LM19 partitions from the HDD

Install W10 in a VM on the SSD (I've tried this on my existing installation, works fine)

Create an NTFS partition towards the end of the HDD, copy W10 data files there; tell the W10 VM where they are

Does anyone see any big flaws in this plan?

TIA

Andrew

[AndyMH]

Create an NTFS partition towards the end of the HDD, copy W10 data files there; tell the W10 VM where they are

If you are running win10 inside a VM, e.g. with virtualbox, you don't need an NTFS partition, you can just set up a shared folder in VB pointing at the win10 data you have. To win10 the shared folder with appear as a network drive. Note, virtual box by default installs its VMs in a folder in /home.

Putting /home on the HDD is a waste given that you will have a 250G SSD with only root on it (which need be at most no more than 30G). Put /home on the SSD as well. You don't need a swap partition with mint 19.0, it will automatically use a swap file if there is no swap partition.

You can always mount the partition(s) on the HDD as something like /home/you/data to get easy access.

I've got a similar setup, 480G SDD as main drive, 2TB HDD in the ultrabay in place of the DVD drive.

Note - assuming you are using virtualbox, in addition to installing VB in mint, you also need to download and install (in mint) the extension pack and install guest-additions (in win10) and make sure you are a member of the vboxusers group. The general recommendation with VB is not to install the version from software manager but get it direct from oracle (latest is version 6.0). I run win7 in VB.

[ats4603]

Hi Andy

Many thanks for your reply - a bit more detail...

I have a Lenovo G505s laptop, with a 2TB HDD. There are a lot of partitions on this, including several that I assume are either W10 recovery-type things, or Lenovo bloatware - basically the whole drive is a bit of a mess, with unused space all over the place. One of the reasons I am planning this change is to get rid of these (incidentally, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well a clean install of W10 in VMWare Player works- still hate it, but it is at least usable; even updates are pretty quick).

One of the reasons I thought of putting the /home partition, and an NTFS partition, on the HDD was because of what I've read about excessive erasing and re-writing to a SSD was bad for the solid state disk - maybe this isn't true nowadays? Samsung do offer a 5-year warranty on their Evo SSDs and claim 1200 TBW, which sounds good? Also, I've got >300GB of files in my /home partition, so it won't fit on the SSD. Do I need to be worried about Firefox/Chrome doing a lot of writes to the SSD? Or anything else?

Thanksagain

Andrew

[AndyMH]

Don't know VMware, I'm a virtualbox user. So I don't know how it handles access to the rest of the file system.

I wouldn't worry about writes to your SSD, they are much improved from their initial offerings. The only thing I've done with mine (and I have quite a fair number) is leave a few GB unallocated at the end of the drive. Picked this up as a recommendation somewhere in another post in the forum. I'd still put /home on the SSD even if you don't put much there - you want access to all your config files to be as fast as possible.

Andy

[ats4603]

I think VMWare and VB have similar "shared folders" capabilities - I can access the files on my "real" W10 partition via a shared folder.

Good point about access to config files. I'll have a look into splitting out the big data files (videos, music, OS ISOs etc) and just put those on the HDD. I'll have to brush up on symlinks!

I'd seen the idea of putting a few GB at the end of the SSD and will do that.

Andrew

[AndyMH]

I'll have to brush up on symlinks!

I wouldn't bother, I'd do what I suggested earlier and mount your HDD as something like /home/andrew/data and put all your music, videos, etc. in there. And unless you really think you must, I wouldn't bother with NTFS partitions if your primary OS is linux.

[ats4603]

Yes, makes sense.

[AndyMH]

Assume you are happy about editing your fstab to mount the HDD?

[ats4603]

Yep, done that to mount the W10 partition at startup (whether I can remember how I did it is another matter!).