Transferring from Old HDD to SSD

Senk · 2012-07-20 20:47:18

So, while I'm not a beginner with software development on Linux or using standard UNIX tools, I am very new with ArchLinux. I've been running a setup of mine for a few months on a hard drive in my old Fujitsu T5010 laptop. I bought a Crucial 256 GB SSD and installed it into the laptop.

If you don't want to wade through stuff, skip through the 'My Journey' down to 'My Problem'.

I tried following this guide:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mi … w_hardware

My Journey:
Using rsync, I made a backup of what I thought was a collection of files that were from installations of packages, my edits to configuration files, etc. I've had my misgivings about this method, but followed through with the suggestion on the wiki article.

Anyway, attempt one, I use a net installation and install the barebones (just the base packages) along with pmount and rsync. My backup of my HDD was made to an external HDD I had sitting around in NTFS format (probably not a good idea). So, after ArchLinux was up and running happily, I used pmount to mount my external HDD and rsync to transfer things back to my machine. This caused ArchLinux to not be able to access my SSD on boot up and quite a few other issues that I should have written down... but didn't.

So, attempt two, I wipe the SSD again and install ArchLinux. This time, I was going to start by restoring the home directory of my main user account, rcsvt. Of course, it was late at night and I pointed it at my root directory by mistake causing a ton of junk to be thrown in it. Not thinking properly, I reformatted... again.

So, attempt three, ArchLinux is set up and the home directory of rcsvt is successfully copied and I readded the account with adduser, allowing it to not copy over the skeleton files and instead use the existing ones. Things seemed to be okay. I had also followed the suggestion of using the following code to get a list of packages to reinstall:

$ pacman -Qqe | grep -vx "$(pacman -Qqm)" > Packages
$ pacman -Qqm > Packages.aur

# xargs -a Packages pacman -S --noconfirm --needed

My Problem:
Alright, so, what is my actual problem? Well, I have the feeling that permissions for some of the files copied (or installed with the packages) might be off. Or, maybe it's the permissions of my user account. This is been made especially clear when I've tried to use cabal to install xmobar from scratch to include extra plugins that I used with my configuration. Here's the example:
Log from rcsvt
Log from root
This seems to work with root permissions, but not with the user rcsvt. On my old HDD, my user account was able to do this with no issues.

So, is there something that stands out that I've done wrong by using rsync to copy over my /home/rcsvt directory and reinstalling all of my old packages using the list I generated? I'd really, really hate to have to wipe my system again if it's gone bonky with permissions... but it just doesn't seem like anything would have affected it.

Is there a better way to do this so that my new SSD has the same setup as my old HDD? I know that directly transferring everything is a terrible idea because of changes in hardware... so, I'm at a loss as to what could be done aside from a file backup, which seems to have not worked nearly as well as I would have hoped. I've still got the old HDD, by the way, and a cable to convert SATA to USB. So, I can hook it up to my machine, if that gives me any options.

I've read that NTFS has issues with file permissions; so, should I use rsync directly from my old HDD that was ext4 if I connect it with a SATA to USB?

Other information:
Using visudo, I uncommented the wheel permissions for sudo with no password needed so my user account of rcsvt could use sudo without having to type in a password each time. Aside from that, I haven't made any attempts to alter other files back to the way they were on my old system. As for the old system, I barely edited any files aside from adding some startup modules and editing the global vimrc file.

I really wish I could run my old system as it was because it had everything just where I wanted it.

Last edited by Senk (2012-07-20 21:28:20)

boast · 2012-07-21 01:42:08

For future reference, I just did this last week and it was just:
1. Boot into live cd
2. Mount both drives
3. format ssd to ext4
4. use cp -a to copy everything from the hdd to the ssd
5. setup grub with the ssd

and that was it.

Now the thing is, it seems you may have done that rsync without preserving the owner/permissions and stuff. But you're saying you haven't wiped your old hdd yet right?

lemons · 2012-07-21 02:17:10

I'm not sure if this would work but could creating the same users on the new hard drive possibly work?

Senk · 2012-07-21 04:05:02

boast wrote:

For future reference, I just did this last week and it was just:
1. Boot into live cd
2. Mount both drives
3. format ssd to ext4
4. use cp -a to copy everything from the hdd to the ssd
5. setup grub with the ssd
and that was it.
Now the thing is, it seems you may have done that rsync without preserving the owner/permissions and stuff. But you're saying you haven't wiped your old hdd yet right?

Yeah, I've still got it. By everything, do you literally mean from the root directory (not /root/ but /)? Wouldn't that cause a lot of issues? If not, I'm willing to give it a shot. I'll just have to remember to update fstab again.

lemons wrote:

I'm not sure if this would work but could creating the same users on the new hard drive possibly work?

I actually did that as the only user I had on the old drive was rcsvt. There seems to be something of issue with either that account's directory or the way the packages were installed from my list.

DSpider · 2012-07-21 06:10:29

Um... tl;dr

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fu … le_command
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fu … quirements

Don't use NTFS for Arch, lol.

boast · 2012-07-21 15:00:57

Senk wrote:

Yeah, I've still got it. By everything, do you literally mean from the root directory (not /root/ but /)? Wouldn't that cause a lot of issues? If not, I'm willing to give it a shot. I'll just have to remember to update fstab again.

Yeah from /, worked fine for me. Oh yeah and I also changed the UUID label for the ssd as root. Guess the posted wikis cover it.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-07-20 20:47:18

Transferring from Old HDD to SSD

#2 2012-07-21 01:42:08

Re: Transferring from Old HDD to SSD

#3 2012-07-21 02:17:10

Re: Transferring from Old HDD to SSD

#4 2012-07-21 04:05:02

Re: Transferring from Old HDD to SSD

#5 2012-07-21 06:10:29

Re: Transferring from Old HDD to SSD

#6 2012-07-21 15:00:57

Re: Transferring from Old HDD to SSD

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