In fact the new disk has the double size tham the old one. Could I use double and then gparted to achieve this?

Depending on how much customization you have done, it might be easier and safer to just install the OS from scratch to the new disk. You'll also end up in a much more "clean" state afterwards.

• Your program settings, browser favorites, etc should all be stored in /home/
• Your system settings are generally stored in /etc

I would take a backup of the whole system (important!), then take a second copy of only these two folders (save all the permissions and ownership info, and also use sudo to access all the files in /etc !). After you have saved everything, wipe both disks, set them up like you want and reinstall all the software you need. Finally you can restore from these two folders.

You will not want to restore everything in /etc, just the files you have manually/indirectly edited, and also you will need to preserve the correct file permissions, so be careful on what you do there. Some files like /etc/fstab hold the information on how your disks are mounted, so you really don't want to restore those (same for /etc/passwd, systemd units, and many others). Basically restore selectively only what you need, or reconfigure the software again and just restore your /home

It shouldn't take as much time as it sounds, because most of the settings should be in your home folder, and you can reinstall all the software pretty quickly when you need them. You also won't have to fight all the problems if you end up with a weird/incomplete setup when moving the root.

There is a few bytes at the beginning of the hard disk that tells the BIOS from where to load the OS.

These bytes don't belong to any particular partition.

What you want is very doable you just need to reinstall the bootloader after or else your system won't boot.

Try to find a Linux person near you to help or if you want to test for your self. Make a simulation using a virtual machine and see if you could accomplish what you want there before doing it in your real system

if OP will use "dd" then they need to make sure that new disk is bigger than old disk.

Even then after the "dd" command is complete, the new disk would appear to be same size as old disk. OP would then need a disk resizing tool to reclaim the remaining disk space

depends on if you copy over the partition table as well iirc. For this to work you'll have to have the /etc/fstab file be defined using UUIDs, not disk names. you can do this with something like:

dd if=/dev/mycurrentdrive of=/dev/newdrive bs=10M

reinstalling the bootloader isn't hard though, just make sure you know if your system is configured to boot via bios or uefi

Rsync -rav --exclude home / /destination

Even if I move the bootloader partition?

(First make and test backups, then) Clone the drive. Then point the OS on the new drive to /home on your old drive. Keep or remove old OS files.

Moving the OS is difficult because you would need to reinstall the bootloader which may or may not be easy depending on your skills.

keeping the OS and moving your home is much much easier. as simple as opening fstab and adding a new line entry

https://distrochooser.de/

Edit: not really for this purpose. But maybe you can ask ChatGPT or European https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

I went with xfce because it said it was lighter weight. Switching to cinnamon is easy enough, I only have steam installed so far.

Linux isn't really like that where one distro is better for certain hardware than others (the one exception being the few distros that avoid proprietary drivers like Debian). It's really more of a personal preference. If you're not sure, start with something easy for beginners like Mint or Kubuntu.

i don't know about such emulator that does that but, i have an old laptop (toshiba satellite E1 vision from around 2014) and i installed void linux 32bit with xfce desktop, it became usable again. it uses hdd. a little bit slow but usable. maybe it could be a recommendation for you

The laptop has an M.2 SSD

Yea then there should be no speed issues related to it.

Coming up on 24 years!

Wow you're a real man. A ton of respect for you.

Cinnamon would be better for her, in my opinion, because it's similar to Windows 7 in many logical concepts. I have many older people who have been using Mint Cinnamon since 2019, and I haven’t had to fix anything for them since then. Before that, it was a nightmare because they would click on any ads, and advertising malware would pollute the entire system.

I am downloading Mint xfce currently, was to see how that runs and if it goes well do cinnamon. The laptop has an M.2 SSD, unsure of the capacity, but I am going to guess 512gb.

congrats on having one btw

Coming up on 24 years!

Well first of all the "best" distros in many people's opinions are DIY ones like Arch or Gentoo and for older hardware it's minimal distros which have learning curves of their own so such lists would probably be bad for beginners.

Anyways your hardware isn't too slow so any distro should be usable I think. Choose one that is well known and that has a desktop environment (UI) you think your wife (congrats on having one btw) would like. If you have no idea, just go for the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint. Its UI is very much similar to Windows and it's as easy to use as it gets.

If you're feeling brave, you can try a distro with vanilla (not customized as hell) GNOME environment like Fedora. It's unique and known for not having any features by default lol so it's very easy once you get a hang of it. The UI is the most similar to Android than anything I'd say.

EDIT: any modern OS will be pretty slow if it's installed on an HDD (spinning hard drive). If you have that, I'd highly recommend upgrading to a cheap SSD. The difference will be night and day, especially in boot times.

I have Mint xfce downloading already. I figure I would live boot that and let her get a feel for it. Then try Cinnamon or another distro.

It still powerful laptop actually, any distro will work but for newbie mint ofc :)

not sure of a tool like that but you can learn a lot about distros & reqs here: https://distrowatch.com/

for that machine, check out linux mint lmde, based on debian, if you’re looking for something stable & has minimal learning curve.

anything that isn't windows will run on hardware like that, most Linux distributions are way more lightweight than even a modern browser

Hmm. So the battery's a factor then.

I'm not specifically familiar with your specific hardware, but I'd try charging the laptop when it's off.

On PC laptops, my understanding is that normally, just the BIOS controls charging in that case, so that takes the OS out of the equation. If it's not charging in that situation, then I doubt that the operating system is going to be able to change the situation; the battery management system (BMS) on your hardware doesn't like the battery, for whatever reason. Dead, not actually the right model...shrugs Dunno.

From a Linux standpoint, you can pull whatever information you can about the battery looking in the virtual files under /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0. If there's no BAT entry, I'd guess that Linux can't even see a battery, that the BMS is saying that there's nothing there.

EDIT: I was thinking that maybe if there was a ribbon cable connecting the battery to the rest of the system, maybe it wasn't properly reconnected or something, but doing a really quick skim of this video replacing said battery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DONdmtR6mug

It looks like there is a ribbon cable, but it runs to a board containing the trackpad as well as the battery, and given that you haven't said anything about the trackpad not working, I assume that it's back in place.

EDIT2: In that video, it looks like the old battery is glued to the battery board, and the guy has to use some "adhesive softener" to get it out. If you did the same, I assume that there is liable to be some goop floating around in there. I assume that there are some contacts between the battery connector and the battery board; mayhap it or something like that got on top of the battery contacts. You might consider trying to clean those if other things don't work and the system can't see the battery.

EDIT3: Yeah, the top comment on that video is indeed someone who apparently didn't get the ribbon cable all the way back in, and their keyboard wasn't working.

The first time I replaced the back cover and tried logging in I couldn't type in my password. I followed Apple's hints but they didn't work so I took the cover back off again and refitted the flex cable. This time there was a satisfying little snap sound when I plugged it in at the logic board end and after that everything worked fine. Best to just put a couple of the screws back in the back cover and try logging in to make sure.

If you're not seeing that, I assume that the ribbon cable is properly connected.

EDIT4: Oh, the batttery has a second cable that goes right to the battery. The other cable just had to come off because it obstructs removing the battery. Sorry, comes from just doing a quick skim. Might check that that cable is in all the way.

yes, it had an old aftermarket battery that was working ok, but discharged quickly, so figured might as well get a new one.

Did the laptop charge when the old battery was present?

I agree. Linux gaming has come a long way, but if OP likes playing any competitive game, it's best to dual boot. Linux gamers have been banned from Apex Legends, for example, after the anti-cheat falsely flagged them.

Having said that, I've had a dual boot for 7 years now and I've only used my Windows side for a few rare games (Apex, Overwatch, etc). Never for software. But then again I'm a software dev so YMMV.