Arch Linux

luciferHasa

Member

Registered: 2018-08-20

Posts: 29

Installing software to a different hard drive

hello,

is it possible to install software to another hard drive?

eg: when your OS is on sdc and you want to install to sda per say?

i booted the ISO to ram and installed to the same usb,

and now i have decided to move to arch from windows

and i want to either move the whole OS to another disk

(that would be another question > https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 8#p1804168 )

or change the installation path of software

thanks

Last edited by luciferHasa (2018-08-25 06:32:50)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: Installing software to a different hard drive

Pacman can install to another root, but no, you cannot install software to somewhere other than your OS ... as it would not then be installed, just downloaded.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: Installing software to a different hard drive

is it possible to install software to another hard drive?

Yes.

Your question is rather vague.

There are a variety of ways, but most people would just use LVM.

mcloaked

Member

From: Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1,351

Re: Installing software to a different hard drive

hello,

is it possible to install software to another hard drive?

eg: when your OS is on sdc and you want to install to sda per say?

i booted the ISO to ram and installed to the same usb,

and now i have decided to move to arch from windows

and i want to either move the whole OS to another disk

(that would be another question > https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 8#p1804168 )

or change the installation path of software

thanks

When you first install arch - you can of course set up partitions on one drive, eg have the root partition on say sda, have another linux partition on say sdb - and then make the os install onto the root partition - once the initial install is done, then you can bind mount the linux partition on sdb to say /home and if you had a second linux partition on sdb or a third drive, you could then bind mount that partition to /opt for example.  You do do a similar this with lvm instead of fixed partitions. It all depends on how you want to make your mounted partitions match the various partitions on your drives. Once you have done these changes you need to make sure that your fstab reflects which partitions will be mounted.

However if you have already installed onto a specific partition you can't tell pacman to install a package to a different drive unless you run the install again - but you can copy over an installation to a different drive with some caveats... so it all depends on the details of what you want to achieve. You can make specific directories bind mount to a partition on a different drive in which case some directories within the root directory structure could point to partitions on another drive but that could lead to problems.

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Mike C