James Harper <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> writes:
everything for me, I've never used gpt before. I believe I'm supposed to make a partition called the BIOS boot partition...
With BIOS/GPT/grub, you need a 1MB grub kludge partition. This is not needed for BIOS/GPT/extlinux. I presume it's not needed for EFI/GPT/grub either, but as Jason notes, you already have an EFI kludge partition in that case. extlinux 5.x allegedly boots off EFI; I have not tried this.
can I store data on here or is it separate to my existing /boot partition?
I don't know if grub can deal correctly with a mix of BIOS/MSDOS and BIOS/GPT in the same machine. It *probably* can, but I wouldn't want to rely on it. If you had RAID1, I'd say get booting working on the new disk, then you know when you chuck out the pre-GPT disks, you'll be fine. But you only have one GPT disk, so you can't remove the msdos disks long enough to be sure that grub is booting purely off BIOS/GPT disks. If budget isn't an issue, I'd say fuck it, just provision a new array entirely on BIOS/GPT (or EFI/GPT) disks, and move all the data across. If budget is an issue, maybe you should set up a /boot on a USB key, so that you have a fallback in case the wrong disks go tits-up.