Use old laptop's hard drive?

[DoYouKubuntu]

I'm bleeping thrilled to report that it went off without a hitch!!

I didn't have the strength to unscrew a couple of the teensy-weensy screws in the old laptop, so my helper did that, but the rest was a breeze. I plugged it in to my new laptop's USB 3.1 Gen 2 type A port, lights flashed, Device Notifier popped up...the anticipation built...remembering those failed attempts with the thumb drives...VOILA! It's there, all of it, all of its partitions, just like that.

Thanks everyone for your input and support. I appreciate it.

[GreyGeek]

1) Wear a wrist grounding strap when poking around inside your box. Or, keep one finger on the chassis while poking around.
2) I plug my USB HD enclosure into my USB 3.0 port for the reason jlittle mentioned. From WIkipedia:

Low-power and high-power devices

Low-power devices may draw at most 1 unit load, and all devices must act as low-power devices when starting out as unconfigured. 1 unit load is 100 mA for USB devices up to USB 2.0, while USB 3.0 defines a unit load as 150 mA.

High-power devices (such as a typical 2.5-inch USB hard disc drive) draw at least 1 unit load and at most 5 unit loads (5x100mA = 500 mA) for devices up to USB 2.0 or 6 unit loads (6x150mA= 900 mA) for SuperSpeed (USB 3.0 and up) devices.

My WD 2.5" 650Gb HD uses 5V and 0.56Amps. The USB 2.0 port would choke on it, The USB 3 can supply 0.9Amps, so no problem.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Thanks, GG, but it's a done deal, and I lived to tell about it. (I unplugged it before doing anything.) As I posted above, "I plugged it in to my new laptop's USB 3.1 Gen 2 type A port"--and it works great! Super-duper fast. Now...uh-oh, here we go again...I want to NAME each partition. Without rendering the drive unusable. Right now they have labels like "d0707138-7a62-4d2e-a52e-ff678837d27c"--which is not exactly intuitive.

Can someone kindly guide me through a foolproof method of simply giving each of the three partitions a name, without being prompted to do anything that could cause data loss?

Anyway, my success with it--after that spell of nothing but problems--has prompted me to have another brilliant idea: take the old laptop's DVD-RW drive out, put it in an enclosure, and be able to use it with my new laptop, too! Last night I started looking at enclosures on Amazon, but I got stuck because there are apparently two heights, 9mm and 12.7mm. I have absolutely no idea which mine is. I thought about ordering both, then returning the one that doesn't fit, but I don't normally do that, so I probably won't.

I reviewed that laptop's specs, but couldn't find anything referring to its size in millimeters. Purely by looking at it from the outside, I'm guessing it's the larger size, but I don't know. Is there some easy way to find its size?

[Snowhog]

9mm is .354 inches. 12.7mm is .5 inches.

[claydoh]

n someone kindly guide me through a foolproof method of simply giving each of the three partitions a name, without being prompted to do anything that could cause data loss?

Use Gparted or KDE PartitionManager to add a label to each partition. In the KDE tool, just right click on the partition, and select 'properties' Fill in the label section, click OK, then in the main window hit 'apply'


I did not even have to unmount anything, other than the exfat-formatted USB thumb drive, in order to set labels

I just now added labels to everything I have in front of me:




No re-formatting or loss of data at all.

Useful to note, changing the label on the drives NOT in the fstab also changes the mount point to /media/$USER/$LABEL instead of some random characters.

Again, as I have mentioned in the past, adding labels to the partitions will do what you want to make them show up in a more human-readable form.

[DoYouKubuntu]

9mm is .354 inches. 12.7mm is .5 inches.

Yep, it sure is! And, as noted, by looking at it [from the outside], it looks like it's the larger size, but I'm not sure.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Use Gparted or KDE PartitionManager to add a label to each partition. In the KDE tool, just right click on the partition, and select 'properties' Fill in the label section, click OK, then in the main window hit 'apply'

The thing is--and this was with the thumb drives--KDEPM required a mount point...and something else... Anyone remember [from my copious posts]? File system type, I think. And it went downhill from there. I don't think I had ever used KDEPM prior to that--I've always used gParted--and I really can't say what possessed me to try something new while trying something new, but there you go!

I did not even have to unmount anything, other than the exfat-formatted USB thumb drive, in order to set labels

I just now added labels to everything I have in front of me:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]9195[/ATTACH]
No re-formatting or loss of data at all.

Useful to note, changing the label on the drives NOT in the fstab also changes the mount point to /media/$USER/$LABEL instead of some random characters.

Again, as I have mentioned in the past, adding labels to the partitions will do what you want to make them show up in a more human-readable form.

Right--but it did not work out well last time I tried. If you recall, I'd never experienced any problems in the past doing this, but I did now! That's why I'm being ultra-cautious. This hard drive, although backed up in various places, has data that I'd rather not lose.

Thanks for your input, @claydoh. When I get up the nerve to try, I'll fire up gParted and give it a whirl.

I did something I thought was kind of cute to make the partitions easily recognizable in Dolphin: I added images to each one's root, so they display on Dolphin's folder thumbnails. One has a bunch of pictures, telling me it used to be my /data partition (which held all media files, like photos and videos); one has the roots of a bulb showing, telling me it was /; the last has a pic of my front porch, indicating /home.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Will anyone be surprised that my results were totally different than @claydoh's? I fired up gParted, looked at the external drive, saw its partitions and swap space, right-clicked on a partition and...NOTHING. "Name Partition" is, of course, grayed out. For me. YMMV.

@claydoh said "I did not even have to unmount anything, other than the exfat-formatted USB thumb drive, in order to set labels," but it's clear to me that the only way I'm going to un-gray the naming option is by unmounting the partitions. That feeling of impending doom is back...

If I logged in as root and ran gParted, would I then have the naming option? Or is it solely a matter of unmounting?

I've never, in 35 years of using *nix been AFRAID to unmount something. (I used to do it with the cleverly named umount command--I always thought it was funny that TPTB thought taking out the 'n' was a good idea. Gotta keep those commands as cryptic as possible! ) But after the catastrophic problems I had with the thumb drives, well, yeah.

I'm going to fire up KDEPM and see if it's different there...

...nope. Same thing, only it's much prettier to look at! It even has shiny padlocks on each of the partitions.

[Snowhog]

You can not change a partition name while it is mounted. And, you don't want to unmount a partition you are currently using (have mounted).

For what you are wanting to do, you need to have GParted on a bootable device (USB stick), boot into GParted and then select the unmounted partition(s) you want to name/rename.

[DoYouKubuntu]

You can not change a partition name while it is mounted. And, you don't want to unmount a partition you are currently using (have mounted).

See, this directly contradicts what @claydoh said! He specifically said he did not need to unmount anything.

For what you are wanting to do, you need to have GParted on a bootable device (USB stick), boot into GParted and then select the unmounted partition(s) you want to name/rename.

Oh, crap. Too much trouble, and not what I was hoping to do.

I do have a bootable USB stick--it's what I used to install Kubuntu on this laptop, after my first method (installing from a command line) failed. Miserably. But I want to do what @claydoh did! How come it works for him but not me?

[claydoh]

You can not change a partition name while it is mounted. And, you don't want to unmount a partition you are currently using (have mounted).

For what you are wanting to do, you need to have GParted on a bootable device (USB stick), boot into GParted and then select the unmounted partition(s) you want to name/rename.

LABELS can be changed without unmounting, unless it is a fatt32/exfat drive, it seems.

Pics to follow...

[claydoh]

Part one

[claydoh]

Part 2

[DoYouKubuntu]

Oh, God...@claydoh, I'm sorry. I just didn't fu...bleeping look there. I stopped when I saw the grayed-out partition naming thing. Ugh. I'll try it again in a minute.

Sorry.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Okay, success!

But... Why aren't the new names showing? In some places. Here's Dolphin; they're there on the left under "Removable Devices," but they're not shown with their corresponding icons:



Ditto for df at a command line.