Arch Linux

menteith

Member

Registered: 2022-01-18

Posts: 39

Swap root and home partitions

Hi guys,
Yesterday I installed Arch Linux I'm really impressed how nice and powerful this distribution is. I made a silly mistake during the installation process, thought. I wrongly chose /dev/sda3 as /home partition and/dev/sda4 and root partition. It should have been the other way round. As I've installed many applications and have done some customizations, I would like to avoid reinstalling Arch. Can I swap root with home?
Two options comes to my mind:

1. Create an image of each partition and write it to the right place.
2. Use tar to compress the content of each partition and then uncompress the content to the right place.

After each procedure, I would use Arch installation medium to regenerate fstab (I suppose UUIDs  change) and then reinstall GRUB.

What are your thoughts about it?

Thanks in advance!

Last edited by menteith (2022-01-18 11:13:02)

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Long time Debian user who switched to Arch.

d_fajardo

Member

Registered: 2017-07-28

Posts: 1,568

Re: Swap root and home partitions

You can also do a system back up with rsync: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rsync# … tem_backup
Then fix your partition mouth points and restore with rsync again. It also probably good to wipe the partition clean before restore.

menteith

Member

Registered: 2022-01-18

Posts: 39

Re: Swap root and home partitions

Rsync it is! Thanks!

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Long time Debian user who switched to Arch.