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I got DELL Inspiron 5521 notebook with 1Tb spinning drive /dev/sda which holds several partitions, Win7 among them on /dev/sda5 and Ubuntu root partition on /dev/sda7. It is dual EFI bootable.

Today I replaced a DVD drive with new 120 Gb SSD.

Si, I need to move linux from /dev/sda7 (root) and /dev/sda8 (home) to /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2 respectively.

Shall I create a new EFI partition on /dev/sdb to add Ubuntu booting option?

Can I copy ubuntu partitions as I don't like the idea to install it and setup again?

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  • Check this question and answer, which is basically the same as yours. The big twist is that you've got an EFI-bootable system, which make boot loader handling a bit different.
    – Rod Smith
    Jun 23, 2015 at 12:28

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I would set up the new disk with an EFI partition. It wont take up much space, and gives you the ability to easily move the disk without having to change existing parition sizes to add an ESP later. I would use the --removable on the grub-install to put a copy of the grubx64.efi bootloader into /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi. (If you are using secure boot, you theoritically should use --uefi-secure-boot, but last time I tried it, that did nothing, instead of putting shimx64.efi in /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi and a copy of grubx64.efi. So you'll still have to manually copy in the correct files).

Your other potential problem is the disk caddy. Grub may have problems when the caddy is present -- like freezing for a minute, or maybe indefinitely. This may occur even if the caddy is not used for boot. A workaround is to have a device like USB you can put earlier in the boot order than the hard disks, but you might still not be able to reference the caddy until you boot, so good luck. The caddy will still be usable as a storage device.

See the comment about moving the files. Nothing special for an SDD in a caddy.

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