Arch Linux

Automath

Member

Registered: 2016-05-16

Posts: 115

Migrating to a fresh install

What I should have in account in order to mantain system configuration, installed packages, users and groups coming from another arch linux system that is unable to update since two or three months ago?

I already backuped all my home files, included configuration files, I made a backup of installed packages using:

pacman -Qqn>native
pacman -Qqf>foreign
ls  /var/cache/pacman/pkg/>packages

Indeed the last command excluded every package that pacman already listed, eg pacman -Qq|while ...; do ls ...

Now I remember that I forgot about users and groups!

What I'm planning to do is to backup users, group, passwd, shadow, and gshadow from /etc dir and simply overwrite those files to the new system. Yes, you can call me newbie but I already know that this is a rough method, but it is the most code economic solution, and also why shouldn't that work?

Now I should also care about hosts and running services but I think I can deal with that manually.

Is it anything missing from my list?

Last edited by Automath (2021-05-18 19:01:14)

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: Migrating to a fresh install

Why not just fix the broken system and then migrate the whole thing to the new machine?

---

No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
Closing -- for deletion; Banning -- for muppetry. - jasonwryan

aur - dotfiles

Automath

Member

Registered: 2016-05-16

Posts: 115

Re: Migrating to a fresh install

Because that hard drive is ready to fail, it's a complex task (broken pacman database, missing files), and as you already told me I am a PEBCAK /s

Also I need a computer running asap and I have an empty hard drive and I'm better at installing arch linux than fixing complex things.

Btw, I changed my setup now to a different motherboard, also this stressed PEBCAK had broken pin 19 of that ide drive (luckly ground) and though the computer luckly still can read that disk it's unable to boot from it, so I'm not going to try to fix it.

Last edited by Automath (2021-05-18 18:57:45)