On Wed, 2025-08-20 at 23:21 -0700, David Christensen wrote: > On 8/20/25 21:34, Van Snyder wrote: > > On Wed, 2025-08-20 at 23:15 -0500, David Wright wrote: > > > But if the OP is intent upon converting the disk, a more manual > > > approach, > > > > I'm the OP. Dell told me that there's a Windoze 10 product key > > burned > > into the MB. They said to download a Win 10 installer and it would > > register automagically. So I backed up /home, used gparted to > > change > > the disk from MBR to GPT (which blew away the partition table), > > installed Windoze (which took the whole disk without asking), > > shrank it > > using gparted, installed Debian 13, restored /home — and it didn't > > boot. So I reinstalled Debian 13 and the grub installer figured out > > how > > to set up booting correctly. It only took me about twelve hours. > > > I am glad it worked out for you. :-)
I asked the gparted maintainers towork out a way to comvert MBR to GPT and preserve the patitions and patition table. They said that ever OS has a different boot program, which they probably couldn't recover. I told them that that would at least me to run a rescue disk and re-run grub=update. This would be much faster than the dance I had to do. Maybe they'll do it. > > > David >
