Linux Drive Naming Scheme Explained

Your plan sounds good to me. If your MBR is installed on sda then you are right in assuming that you won't be able to boot into Ubuntu easily.

Point 7 will be the one that you will want to look at boot repair.

Your other option could also be to clone your dying drive. If you can temporarily replace your SSD with your new hard drive (or use a USB to SATA connector), you could use dd to copy over the information from your old hard drive. This would save you the reinstallation of Windows, your programs, your data and your MBR.

1. You can do that by having both your old hard drive and your new hard drive connected to your computer.
2. Then you start up the computer with a Live CD (or USB).
3. Use dd to copy your old drive: sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=16M

You will need to replace /dev/sdX with the drive letter of your old drive, and /dev/sdY with your new drive.

You can find out the drive letters with sudo fdisk -l . Your new drive will be the disk with no partition information.

It will take a couple hours to copy it, and you won't see any progress updates during that time. If you want a more verbose solution that will even try to copy bad blocks of data, you can use the excellent 'ddrescue' program as well.

To use ddrescue, you will need to enable all repositories in the LiveCD, do a apt-get update and then install it (sudo apt-get install gddrescue). The command is a bit different too: sudo ddrescue /dev/sdX /dev/sdY

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need more information.

Storage Spaces are based on a new proprietary file system from Microsoft called ReFS (resilient file system)

At the time of writing, there is no Open Source software that allows to mount this kind of file system, the only option right now is to use proprietary software:

ReFS for Linux by Paragon Software

Note: I am not affiliated with Paragon Software in any way, I am just stating the facts.