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So this issue goes beyond simply formatting it and I’ve tinkered and made it worse. I’ll try to be somewhat brief. In the end, I’m hoping there is software that can maybe be a one-click solution.

I retired a laptop and that laptop has a way bigger SSD than the one in my new laptop. The old laptop was partitioned in a way to dual boot either windows or Linux Mint. Let’s say the SSD has 1TB of space. I allocated 200GB to Linux and the rest was to windows. Then there’s a factory partition for recovery.

Well, I thought I could just do a quick format on it then begin the process of cloning my smaller SSD currently in the laptop I want to use and all would be good. Wrong.

Now the fucking thing doesn’t let me do anythinge research with it.

I spent time in forums and YouTube researching. I think maybe the Linux partition and the booting options may have been my issue but this was the only computer I’ve ever had set up like that so I was ignorant to the problems I could create.

What kind of solution would just bring this SSD back to being empty and able to accept my clone like the day it was purchased?

So this issue goes beyond simply formatting it and I’ve tinkered and made it worse. I’ll try to be somewhat brief. In the end, I’m hoping there is software that can maybe be a one-click solution. I retired a laptop and that laptop has a way bigger SSD than the one in my new laptop. The old laptop was partitioned in a way to dual boot either windows or Linux Mint. Let’s say the SSD has 1TB of space. I allocated 200GB to Linux and the rest was to windows. Then there’s a factory partition for recovery. Well, I thought I could just do a quick format on it then begin the process of cloning my smaller SSD currently in the laptop I want to use and all would be good. Wrong. Now the fucking thing doesn’t let me do anythinge research with it. I spent time in forums and YouTube researching. I think maybe the Linux partition and the booting options may have been my issue but this was the only computer I’ve ever had set up like that so I was ignorant to the problems I could create. What kind of solution would just bring this SSD back to being empty and able to accept my clone like the day it was purchased?

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On the topic of rescue software, I like things that boot quickly and are small. is an up-to-date live CD image under 500MB that boots to a command-line (protip: setfont -d to make font double size on small 4k monitors). I keep it installed on my drives and USB (with Ventoy) for quick booting where I can fix common problems (borked fstab, imaging between drives, doing a partclone image of my root partition).