Home / ubuntu / Questions / 367896
In Process
Jason
Asked: 2013-10-30 06:26:07 +0800 CST

Alter MBR order of partitions after copying partitions to larger drive

  • 772

I have a new 1TB laptop drive that I want to clone an existing drive to. The issue is that I want to reorder and resize the existing partitions.

The existing partition table for the drive is 

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048    24578047    12288000    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT  11GB (former recovery partition of a Windows drive)
/dev/sda2   *    24578048   216989695    96205824    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT  92GB Windows install partition
/dev/sda3       216989955   863465471   323237758+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT  308GB Windows/Linux universal storage
/dev/sda4       863467518   976771071    56651777    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5       863467520   976771071    56651776   83  Linux            55GB Ubuntu Partition

I want to change the ordering to 

2 x 110 GB for both Windows and Linux
1 x  25 GB for web server and development
1 x 684 GB for Windows/Linux universal storage.

I can create these partitions and copy the corresponding partion over using 

dd if=/dev/sdaX of=/dev/sdbX bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

but that leaves the MBR untouched. If I copy over the existing MBR, it will be invalid since the order of partitions is very different on the new drive.

How can I resolve this issue?

mbr

1 Answers

  1. Use gparted. Create an empty partition table on the new disk, and copy/paste the partitions over.

    • 0