Adding a used SSD to system

[linelocker]

Hi there,
I have a running system that I would like to add an SSD to. I want to use this second SSD as a back-up drive.
The second drive has already got Kubuntu 22.04 installed on it.
The question is, can I just add another SSD when it's already formatted with Kubuntu?
That is, can I turn power off, open the case, plug in the additional drive, close the case and power up, with my
system recognizing the "new" drive without conflict?

System stuff:
OS: Kubuntu 22.04.2 LTS x86_64
Host: 90BG003JUS Lenovo H50-55
Kernel: 5.19.0-43-generic
Uptime: 37 mins
Packages: 3035 (dpkg), 26 (flatpak),
Shell: bash 5.1.16
Resolution: 1920x1080
WM: Awesome
Theme: [Plasma], NsCDE [GTK2], Adwai
Icons: Blueberry [Plasma], NsCDE [GT
Terminal: xfce4-terminal
Terminal Font: Anonymous Pro 12
CPU: AMD A10-7800 Radeon R7 4C+8G (4) @ 3.500GHz [10.2°C]
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
Memory: 3675MiB / 15948MiB (23%)

Drives:
Local Storage: total: 480.08 GiB used: 140.94 GiB (29.4%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Samsung model: SSD 860 EVO 500GB size: 465.76 GiB
speed: 6.0 Gb/s type: SSD serial: S3YANB0K951479K rev: 4B6Q scheme: GPT
ID-2: /dev/sdb type: USB vendor: SanDisk model: Ultra size: 14.32 GiB
type: N/A
serial: 05014c14309045ea4a08da5c39ba4138de9cdd6d84360ee62c be03b6d3ed0dd8f23700000000000000000000cd7591b4ff12 02108155810788a6a6cc
rev: 1.00 scheme: MBR

Is this enough info? I hope so. Thanks for any help

[claydoh]

Reformat it before installing it in the computer, or at least delete or reformat the EFI partition

No problems.

If you don't format it, you will have two OS drives, and your computer might boot the added drive as the first choice. This is the worst that can happen, and easy to deal with until you boot the correct OS, and then format the added drive. Your computer will have an F-key that brings up a BIOS boot selection option, and there will be settings in the BIOS to select the desired boot choice, if you do boot the added drive.

[linelocker]

Reformat it before installing it in the computer, or at least delete or reformat the EFI partition

Didn't see this in time BUT the drive was recognized by my system after startup and boot was normal. The problem is I can't move files to it for some reason.
I notice it has root requirements so can you tell me how to get around that?

[Schwarzer Kater]

If there is nothing on it that also has root access only, you can sudo chown $USER:$USER /path/to/your/mounted/drive ,
e.g. sudo chown dave:dave /media/dave/…

[claydoh]

I notice it has root requirements so can you tell me how to get around that?

I knew I was forgetting to mention permissions.

Linux is very permission and ownership focused, at the system level especially. It is baked into the filesystems.
Even if you format the drive, you will still need to set the ownership. A workaround is to use a Windows type of file system, like NTFS, Exfat or something. Useful if sharing with other operating systems, but you lose some features and stability imo.

sudo chown $USER:$USER /path/to/your/mounted/drive

Actually, that WILL change things for the main directory, but not the files and folders inside. For that, you need to add -R, for 'recursive'.
if you reformat the drive, the above is fine.

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /path/to/your/mounted/drive

[linelocker]

Yes, thank you very much, that handled it