Arch Linux

anthanor2

Member

Registered: 2021-09-24

Posts: 18

Copying an existing arch partition to a live USB

Hi! I did some searching online, but from what I could understand, all the tutorials only showed how to create a fresh arch environment on to a live USB. I've been using arch for a few months now and I love it. I installed it on a Think Pad, but my primary laptop is a mac. While I like using my Think Pad, it's a pain to carry two computers around my university, and my mac has a much bigger screen. I was thinking of booting my arch environment from a live USB as I don't have much storage left on my mac to dual boot. My first question is how should I go about installing my arch environment on to my flash drive. Here is the lsblk output for my internal ssd:

$ lsblk /dev/sda
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 238.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
├─sda3   8:3    0  31.1G  0 part /
└─sda5   8:5    0 206.9G  0 part 

The hard drive has a dual boot with ubuntu at /dev/sda5 and the arch partition is at  /dev/sda3. I would only like to put my arch partition (and the efi partition if I need it) on the flash drive. Additionally, my flash drive is 256GB and I only want to my arch partition to have 50GB, and use the rest as an ordinary exfat partition. How should I do this? I was thinking of just creating three partitions and dd'ing the efi and arch partitions into separate partitions on my flash drive. Would this work?

My second question, is if I can do this, how can I get the flash drive and SSD to sync with each other? Is there a way to do it with dd or should I use rsync? Thanks so much in advance!

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,300

Re: Copying an existing arch partition to a live USB

You can just format the stick and copy over your existing Arch install. I'd not use dd - especially not if your destination and source partitions are going to differ in size, it's going to be slower than necessary, have more dangerous caveats than necessary and the only thing you "gain" over doing the correct rsync is that creation dates on your FAT ESP are preserved.

Partition the stick like you want it, copy your file tree as stated in: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rsync# … tem_backup then fix your fstab/potentially other things of relevance as mentioned in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Instal … ble_medium

Last edited by V1del (2021-11-02 07:26:54)

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,366

Re: Copying an existing arch partition to a live USB

Don't miss the changes to mkinitcpio.conf in V1del's second link, otherwise you'll have a system that you either can't boot or can't interact with.

---

Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus B550-F Gaming MB, 128Gb Corsair DDR4, Fractal Design Define 7 XL, 5 HD (2 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

/ is the root of all problems.