Arch Linux

flamemagister

Member

Registered: 2024-04-02

Posts: 10

Help moving encrypted home partition

Hi all,

In my setup I have two separate physical nvme drives, the first handles / and /boot the second handles /home.
Both are encrypted with LUKS. I want to upgrade the drive that is mounted as /home so that I have more capacity but I am unsure how to achieve this without reinstalling arch again.

Data loss is not an issue everything in my home directory is backed up. Is it possible to replace and re-encrypt the drive simply by making making UUID changes to /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab once the drive is re-encrypted and formatted? I plan to keep mount names, options etc.  I have two m.2 slots so it will mean removing /home during the upgrade before remounting.

I am also not sure if the the system will boot without /home mounted - presumably logging in as root. Or should I move my /home mount to another mount point, say on the first drive and then move it back post upgrade.

Grateful for any help on this and happy to provide any other details.

Thanks

FM

theRedCyclops

Member

Registered: 2022-06-17

Posts: 69

Re: Help moving encrypted home partition

The system will fail to boot properly if it's unable to mount /home. The easiest way to migrate the /home nvme would probably be: replacing the / and /boot nvme with the new drive, boot a recovery USB, and cloning the current /home nvme to the new one and after this expanding the file system on the new one, after doing this the old /home nvme may be removed and the / and /boot drive reinstalled on the system. This would keep the UUID of the filesystem and (hopefully) skip any reconfiguration.

Last edited by theRedCyclops (2024-05-21 21:02:49)