Hey Folks - I have Endeavouros installed on a hard drive. I like this OS and plan to stick with it, so i’ve bought a new solid state drive to install it on, to speed things up a bit.
What would be the best way to approach moving my installation to the new drive?
If I imaged the partition and restored it to the new disk, that wouldn’t give me a bootable system right? Because I would be missing the bootloader, is that correct?
Also, I guess this would be the right time to ask about disk encryption. What are the disk encryption options with Endeavouros? Is Endeavour compatible with veracrypt full disk encryption for example?
Lastly, should I format the drive in gpt or mbr? I guess gpt would be more helpful if I wanted to install another distro into a different partition, any thoughts on this?
Windows is not an issue, as I have it installed on another disk separately.
Cloning
If you just want to move your existing installation, you could boot from a LiveCD and clone the existing (whole) drive to the new drive. I assume the new drive would be bigger? So you would need to adjust the partition size after cloning. The easiest way to do that is using GParted.
One thing to consider now is the UEFI boot entry. If you installed your system in UEFI mode, you might need to set up the boot entry for the new drive in your system’s NVRAM.
Encryption
As far as I understand, VeraCrypt does not support full system encryption on Linux. Others please correct me if this is wrong. VeraCrypt is a very good tool for managing encrypted partitions or containers. Just not the system (root) partition. If you would like to use full disk encryption with your system drive, I would recommend using LUKS and reading chapter 2 of this (as always) very good Arch wiki article: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_entire_system#LUKS_on_a_partition
In this scenario you have a separate boot partition which will stay unencrypted. This might be good enough for you or you might want something more complex.
Before trying anything please make sure to have a backup. When first experimenting with encryption you have a high chance of locking yourself out and losing everything. LUKS and cryptsetup is a bit overwhelming at first – but once you figured out the basics it really does not get in your way anymore.
GPT vs. MBR
MBR is a legacy system for organizing drives. While it is still fine for smaller drives it does not make sense to still use MBR on new disks. GPT gives you much more flexibility and is the established default today. If you do not have a very specific reason to still stick to MBR, just use GPT and forget about MBR.
The best way to do it?
I think you should first get familiar with system encryption and decide in which way you want to protect your system. After deciding this, you could perform a fresh installation to the new drive. The installer will set everything up for you. I think there is even an option “Encrypt the installation”. So you would have all the sensible defaults without doing much “manual” work.
