Hi all! and one question... (system transfer from usb drive)

danielstrong52 · 2010-08-12 21:04:24

Hi all, I'm new here, but I decided to forgo the introduction thread; I have a question already

Quick intro:
I'm new to arch, and fairly new to linux. I've been using Ubuntu (and Mint in the last few weeks) since Xmas... never was much into computers in general before that, funnily. Windows doesn't exactly make it easy to learn, does it? Anyway, got arch a few days ago to install on my usb drive, to try out. Hey, I like steep learning curves

So. The thing is I'm on holiday just now, but I have a fair bit of work... I only have my netbook with me, no other machine I can use regularly, so I'd rather not have it down while I go through the arch installation and configuration process... especially if there's a risk of something going wrong. Which I'm sure there is, with me performing the installation. Anyway, I reckon the least fuss way to get arch up n' running on my netbook would be to transfer my current working installation on my usb to my harddrive. I've looked up a few tutorials, but I havn't found much and they differ in the method. I imagine I could do this with a fullblown app like clonezilla, but i'd be happy with a command line util. I found references to dump and ddrescue. If I'm not much mistaken, dd would work too, wouldn't it?

Other than the question of tools, theres a couple other things. Firstly, I'm new to the arch conf files; clearly I'll have to edit a few when moving harddrives. fstab obviously, and menu.lst, but is that all? On a similar vein, a slight complication: on my usb drive I only have the one / partition, no separate /home partition (I don't bother with /boot partitions and such) and no swap either. At the time I thought it would just be a temporary system to play with, and, well, it's only a usb drive. I guess the easiest thing would be create the adequate partitions on my computer harddrive, transfer / to the corresponfing partition, resize and such, and then edit fstab to mount /home and use swap. Would that work? It seems too simple.

Anyway, thanks for the help

Dan

Mektub · 2010-08-13 00:28:16

I guess the easiest thing would be create the adequate partitions on my computer harddrive, transfer / to the corresponfing partition, resize and such, and then edit fstab to mount /home and use swap. Would that work? It seems too simple.

It is simple. I have done similar installations several times.

I copy one media to another with rsync, something like:

rsync -av --delete --exclude="/whatever/"   /  /whatever

Apart fstab, you still have to take care of grub. Having the USB system will help a lot manipulating the details.

On fstab I choose to boot by label instead of device something like:

LABEL=myarch             /               ext3        defaults                                    0 1

On menu.lst:

root   (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/myarch ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

The label thing frees me from the mess of device numbers.

Swap is not a problem, the system boots without and you can even assign it to a file.

Mektub

danielstrong52 · 2010-08-14 11:37:26

I guess the easiest thing would be create the adequate partitions on my computer harddrive, transfer / to the corresponfing partition, resize and such, and then edit fstab to mount /home and use swap. Would that work? It seems too simple.
It is simple. I have done similar installations several times.

I'm glad about that

Thanks for the quick reply and the advice.

Dan

Arch Linux

#1 2010-08-12 21:04:24

Hi all! and one question... (system transfer from usb drive)

#2 2010-08-13 00:28:16

Re: Hi all! and one question... (system transfer from usb drive)

#3 2010-08-14 11:37:26

Re: Hi all! and one question... (system transfer from usb drive)

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