Arch Linux

Kholis1

Member

Registered: 2021-11-24

Posts: 4

Migrate arch linux to new laptop

Hello, i have a laptop lenovo z50-70 (intel i5 4210U, nvidia gtx 840m, Bios Uefi) and i want to migrate from this laptop (unfortunately it broke)) to an hp pavillion with Legacy Bios with integrated gpu. How should I install grub so I can boot to arch and after that what would be needed to rebuild all the necessary drivers?
Thanks in advance

Wild Penguin

Member

Registered: 2015-03-19

Posts: 398

Re: Migrate arch linux to new laptop

Were I in your shoes, I would install Arch the regular way on the new laptop, as this will take care of partitioning and installing the boot loader and after that just copy over /home.

That's almost all that is needed, but also you'd probably need to copy configuration from the old hard drive, preferentially by hand checking the parts you only really need. At minumum you need to create the users you used to have home directories in /home.

You could even copy the whole system with the tool you like, I'd prefer rsync. This will do nothing to the bootloader, and you will still get all the drivers you've installed for the Lenovo z50-70. But that is not a problem, the system should still boot in text mode as Linux Kernel and X.org (the main culprits) are quite intelligent and will not load drivers the system does not have H/W for. It's a matter of installing the correct drivers for the target laptop (and uninstalling the drivers you don't need anymore).

Raynman

Member

Registered: 2011-10-22

Posts: 1,539

Re: Migrate arch linux to new laptop

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Migrat … w_hardware

Kholis1

Member

Registered: 2021-11-24

Posts: 4

Re: Migrate arch linux to new laptop

Thanks a lot, there is one small problem though i forgot to mention. I only have one ssd drive ( the one from lenovo and i want to place it to the hp laptop). In this case what ahould I do?

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: Migrate arch linux to new laptop

Put the drive in the new machine then boot a live image, mount the partitions, (arch-)chroot in then rebuild the initramfs so the autodetect hook adds all the necessary modules (or add them manually via the MODULES array and remove the autodetect hook if you know what you need).

an hp pavillion with Legacy Bios with integrated gpu

If your current system is using a GUID partition table (GPT) then you will have to add a BIOS boot partition to hold GRUB's core.img, which can be placed on the disk with grub-install(8).

For an MS-DOS partition table ("MBR" type) no extra partition is needed but I doubt you're using that with UEFI.

EDIT: I wish I could type

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2022-06-11 14:28:08)

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