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I currently have my root partition on a 480GB Sata SSD. I recently bought a new NVME 2TB drive which I would like to boot off of.

Using Arch Linux btw. What I plan to do is the following:

  • Create a partition table on the new drive, with the same partition layout as the current boot drive (EFI, Swap, /)
  • Backup as necessary
  • Boot into a live Arch USB environment.
  • Mount both drives, use rsync to copy the old root partition to the new root partition on the new drive.
  • Recreate boot partition as necessary following the arch install guide.

Where I am stuck is on the 4th step, where do I mount the drives? When installing arch, usually you mount the drive you want to install to to /mnt, but what about the secondary drive, where do I mount that? Should I instead mount the drives to something like /mnt/new and /mnt/old?

I have read the appropriate arch wiki articles, but they don't mention how/where to mount each drive before actually copying the data.

JLCarveth
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  • This will sound bizarre, but in this case, we need to know what filesystem you are using. Since you're going from a smaller to a larger file system, you can probably just use dd to copy one to the other, but that only works in some cases. Also, you'd need to partition for stuff like /boot and /swap – Satanicpuppy Mar 10 '23 at 18:39
  • Are you keeping both drives installed? You cannot have duplicate UUIDs or GUIDs if gpt which if UEFI it should be.Often better to just do new install, & restore all data & settings from your normal backup. – oldfred Mar 10 '23 at 20:53

1 Answers1

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where do I mount the drives?

Since you are running the commands yourself, at a terminal, you can mount the drives where ever you want. Just make sure you adjust commands to refer to the correct devices and mount points.

mkdir -p /mnt/old /mnt/new
mount [options] /dev/sdX# /mnt/old
mount [options] /dev/nvme#n#p# /mnt/new
rsync [options] /mnt/old/ /mnt/new/
xiota
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