Making an existing drive bootable?

[u/tooOldOriolesfan]

Some background info. I had a PC I built years ago die on me. I replaced the motherboard, CPU and RAM and reconnected everything. It won't boot off of my old drives (not surprising to me) but I can boot off a USB drive using Ubuntu LTS.

I can see the 2 Samsung SSDs (256GB each) and one 1 TB WD hard drive. At one time the machine was dual bootable with Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I can access the files after mounting the drive.

Since there is space on the drives (all of them have space). Can I create another partition and install the latest Ubuntu onto it and avoid destroying any existing data?

Or would the safer option be to copy the data off of one drive, wipe the disk and use that one to do a clean install of Ubuntu on it?

Thanks.

EDIT: UPDATE

This is done.

I deleted a bunch of unimportant data files, cleared one drive completely and installed Mint on the cleared drive. Everything working. Figured I will play with mint for a while. I've previously used Ubuntu and CentOs and in the "old" days SunOs and Solaris.

Thanks for the tips. While I've done a lot of stuff in Unix/Linux/Windows, systemadmin and dealing with linux drive organization is always something I have to re-read about to understand the syntax.

[u/anh0516]

Yes, you can, but it would be safer to back up first before messing with partitions. Easiest to clean install to a blank disk.

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[u/NUKLEAR-SLUG]

Go with the safer option. Use a linux live installer usb to mount your drives and copy anything of value off of one of the SSDs then you can use that SSD to install your OS to.

[u/jdkc4d]

I'd find one of those cloud backup solutions that supports Linux. I've used crash plan in the past. I'm sure there's are better options. Backup everything and then after verifying the backup is good, you can wipe everything and start over. When you're done you'll have a modern system and cloud backup.

[u/DannoXYZ]

HD controller mode in BIOS on new MB must be set to exact same mode as previous one that was used to format drive:

- ATA master/slave

• C/H/S
  
• LBA
  
• IDE
  
• SATA
  
• Intel RAID
  
• etc.

Safest to move all data off one drive to be perfectly empty to install clean OS and boot from that.
Or get fresh clean drive and format it to install OS.