Questions about installing a hard drive in an old laptop

[Cristobal]

Hello Gents,

I found my old laptop (ASUS x57v, circa 2008) of which the hard drive (300GB) is still in good working condition. The plan is to replace the hard drive (250GB) of my current laptop (Thinkpad x200s, circa 2008-2010) with the Asus one.

A few questions :

1) in case I went for a fresh installation, prior to mounting it in the laptop, do I just need to format the Asus drive in fat32/NTFS (for dual boot, installing win10 first, then mx)?
No special prerequisite, just putting it in the rack and that's it?

2) if no fresh installation, is there a way to clone the Thinkpad drive (NTFS win10 partition + ext4 mx partitions), possibly through a software with a GUI, and then just substitute it for the Asus drive?

Sorry for the naive questions, I barely know how to use a screwdriver...

[jackdanielsesq]

Greetings Christobal

Love your handle, Dude

I would simply go with # 1 below - have fun

Highest Regards

Jack

1) in case I went for a fresh installation, prior to mounting it in the laptop, do I just need to format the Asus drive in fat32/NTFS (for dual boot, installing win10 first, then mx)?

[chrispop99]

If you are doing a fresh dual-boot install, get Windows 10 done first, then use the Windows Disk Management tool to shrink the NTFS partition to provide space for MX. When you do the MX install, point the installer to that partition. You would not need to format any partitions, but when I do this I create a Swap partition after the Windows install, then tell the MX installer to use it.

Chris

[Huckleberry Finn]

... Or, if you prepare them beforehand (especially ntfs primary and the first (left-most) partition just to make easy to be detected) Win. will find it and ask where to install, will see it as C: .. you'll go on ..

The 2nd one will also work I think. (You can even do that on GParted on live-session, just let the target drive be "un-allocated space" then copy-paste partitions. You'll also need to copy ("dd" or MX Boot Repair "Backup", later "Restore") the first 512 (MBR) as Windows has "disk signature" there from 441 to 444 ). Or.. "dd" whole etc...

(Assuming they're ms-dos partitioning)

[linexer2016]

Not that I have done it (to date) but I suspect if you are not dual booting and simply want to install MX then a livecd/usb should enable that installation taking the entire drive's space. This assumes you've formatted the drive first I think and you should be able to use GParted from within the livecd/usb.
Interesting questions you've raised because it might start a further discussion relating to what I've written here (I mean, I might not have suggested the best/correct way to do what you want and it's just my expectation of what may be possible).

[Huckleberry Finn]

But he seems to be wanting to keep Win 10 :)

[Cristobal]

Thank you all for the answers.

Indeed, in the cloning option, I would keep the Win10 partition; if I understand correctly Huckleberry Finn's post, it would be feasible with Gparted (I'm going to look into it).

[Huckleberry Finn]

Yesterday I was trying to find these, may be helpful in general, gzip is also proven to work :)

viewtopic.php?f=104&t=52454#p524785

viewtopic.php?f=80&t=52581#p526112

How To Clone HDD or SDD Using GParted

[Cristobal]

Much appreciated.