Clonezilla, PSQL, Local AI, Moving Partitions

1. Clonezilla / partclone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonezilla - (@ Wikipedia) I'm  wondering if anyone has thought about Clonezilla / partclone using discard with SSDs? Afaik, it doesn't. I think it should be even default with modern versions. If you restore whole disk, it could just discard whole disk before writing data. Or when restoring partitions just blkdiscard the partition before starting writing to it. Of course it could be implemented on partclone level, where it could discard the empty regions of the partition where it's not writing data. - Does anyone know why this isn't being done already? - At least as far as I know and have seen. kw: trim, deallocate, unmap, discard

2. Interestingly btrfs when you create a new partition on a SSD, discards whole partition area before starting to create the file system on it.

3. Upgraded bunch of PostgreSQL servers from 16 to version 17. After a few attempts in test environment, rest of the systems went really smoothly using automated script taking care of everything, including intermediate step backups and final cleanups after confirming that everything is good.

4. Windows Recovery environment partition preventing resizing / expanding the "Microsoft basic data" partition. A friend said that you can't change Windows system partition size when installing larger SSD. What? Why you couldn't? They claimed that the Windows recovery environment partition is a problem. No, it's not.

5. Installed Qwen Coder 32B and DeepSeek R1 locally for shared use (friends) on a server, good stuff. - Lots of discussion about DeepSeek R1. Had to explain some friends that it's not a Chinese spy tool, it's something you can run on your own system. Unlike OpenAI stuff, where you'll have to send all your stuff to be analyzed. That's a big big difference. And it's not great for OpenAI. Some are very skeptical that it's Chinese. Well, it is. It got it's own pros and cons.

6. Moving Windows Partitions on the same disk - Simply, first move the Windows partition making space for the recovery environment before the basic partition. Then take the old partition table dump.
   Device     Start     End       Sectors      Size   Type
   /dev/sda1  2048      206847    204800       100M   EFI System
   /dev/sda2  206848    239615    32768        16M    Microsoft reserved
   /dev/sda3  1472512   206272511 204800000    97.7G  Microsoft basic data
   /dev/sda4  248834048 250066943 1232896      602M   Windows recovery environment

7. Modify it, and write a new partition arrangement to the disk, with new start address for the WRE partition.
   Device     Start     End       Sectors      Size   Type
   /dev/sda1  2048      206847    204800       100M   EFI System
   /dev/sda2  206848    239615    32768        16M    Microsoft reserved
   /dev/sda3  1472512   206272511 204800000    97.7G  Microsoft basic data
   /dev/sda4  239616    1472511   1232896      602M   Windows recovery environment

8. And finally move the data from the old location to the new location:
   dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sda skip=121501 seek=117 bs=1M count=602

9. Then it's all done, What problem, where? Now you can extended the Microsoft basic data, ie operating system Windows primary OS partition to whatever size you want to. Friend asked why I'm using Calc. Well, because I want to get my numbers right, duh. And double check everything. Ah, someone asked what's the tool I used to modify the partition table, sfdisk it is. kw: partition table, windows, Linux, partitioning, resizing, moving, reordering, expanding, shrinking, storage systems, block device, file system, ssd, partitions, partition, table, data, and so on ..

10. Too much AI discussion, my brain hurts. Yes, tools are developing fast. And everyone is looking to utilize AI. And even laggards need to be kicked to utilize the AI for efficiently and productivity! As mentioned, there are absolutely HUGE differences between models and suitability for different tasks.

2025-08-10