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Hey all,
My very old Intel iMac finally died 7 months back while I was far away from home. I had upgraded to an SSD before it died with the following setup on the said ssd (1tb).
1. Mac OS X - sda1, sda2 and sda3 for Mac EFI, MacHD (main OS) and a tiny MacOS recovery partitions respectively. Kept it for sentimental reasons.
2. Arch - sda4, sda5 and sda6 for Arch EFI, root and home partitions (btrfs).
3. Fedora - remaining partitions.
Each system has its own EFI partitions (with GRUB installed in Arch and Fedora EFI's). I installed reFind boot manager inside sda1 i.e MacOS EFI.
This setup worked really well for me. Power on, reFind splash face, choose the distro to boot into.
Now I'm back home after 7 months and about to build a new pc.
My main goal is to recover/gain access to my data on my Arch home partition i.e sda6 and if possible boot into Arch.
My questions are:
1. Will I be able to boot into the SSD in the new pc as is? ( I doubt it but asking anyway).
2. If step 1 fails, then what if I chroot and delete sda1, can I then boot into either Arch or Fedora (after reboot )? (Cause each has its own EFI partition with GRUB installed).
3. If step 3 fails, then how about simply chrooting into Arch and reinstalling Grub? Will this get me back into Arch? Or is it necessary to erase Fedora partitions also?
Are my goals achievable? What am I missing?
Any help, suggestions or ideas will be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Last edited by godzillaknight (2023-12-30 17:13:05)
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Will I be able to boot into the SSD in the new pc as is? ( I doubt it but asking anyway).
Definitely not. The EFI partitions may be intact, but the UEFI boot entry to it is missing in the new computer.
what if I chroot and delete sda1, can I then boot into either Arch or Fedora (after reboot )? (Cause each has its own EFI partition with GRUB installed).
how about simply chrooting into Arch and reinstalling Grub? Will this get me back into Arch? Or is it necessary to erase Fedora partitions also?
Some motherboard's UEFI implementation don't allow for multiple EFI partitions. You just have to try and see if it does.
Technically, arch-chrooting into the arch install and doing grub-install and grub-mkconfig should do the trick. If you have os-prober installed and set GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false in /etc/default/grub, then you can have arch add Fedora into your arch grub menu. I said technically because I have no prior experience multi-booting fedora with arch.
Also, since this is a new computer with possibly different devices from your old one, you may have to make modifications to your existing arch installation. Stuff like device drivers, especially for graphics cards, sound card, wifi, intel-ucode vs amd-ucode, etc. Arch's hardware detection is pretty good, so a majority of the new devices will probably be automagically detected, but don't be discouraged if after reinstalling grub you end up with a blank screen. It may just mean you need to install the appropriate drivers to make the new devices work.
My main goal is to recover/gain access to my data on my Arch home partition i.e sda6
Accessing data from /dev/sda6 should be easy with a live medium. Just mount the partition to /mnt from the live environment and you'll have access to everything in it.
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Thanks for your prompt suggestions. Highly appreciated. Sorry for my late reply (it was 2.30 am when I posted the thread).
After reading through your suggestions, you're right, stuff like ucode, wifi driver, graphics driver etc will be different. So, I think it makes sense to erase all non Arch-related partitions. Then reinstall Arch (/dev/sda5 i.e /root ) while leaving the home partition alone. Is this a workable solution? What issue(s) can I expect from this or am I way off? (Keeping in mind I do want to boot into the SSD with /home data intact).
As an aside, I'm getting rx 6700xt AMD GPU for the new build (only had experienced with nVidia so far). If and when I sort out my data issue mentioned above, eventually I intend to use Hyprland . What arch package(s) should I install to get the most out of my GPU? (open source AMDGPU driver route). Is the mesa package enough? What other packages (arch names) are required other than just mesa? (32-bit support, openGL, Vulkan etc).
Thanks again in advance.
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Your plan is workable, although personally, I;ll probably try to get the existing install working without reinstalling.
If you are using a display manager like sddm or lightdm, I would strongly suggest disabling it before moving to the new computer. This way, you'll boot into a virtual console instead of the graphical target, hence lessening the chance of booting into a blank screen. From there, you can then check if you can start your desktop environment. If it fails, then you have some work to do.
My knowledge of amd gpus and hyprland are practically nil, so I'll let other users with the requisite knowledge chime in instead.
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Thanks again.
Yeah, you're right. I should begin with modifying the existing arch installation. Also, I login from the console to DWM, so that's good news.
I'll leave thread open for 1 more day for AMD GPU drivers then close it after.
Cheers.
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One last suggestion:
Check if the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub contains the keyword "quiet". If it does, then I suggest removing it. Believe me, you'll want to see all those messages when booting into the new computer for the first time. It will go a long way towards pointing you in the right direction if something goes wrong.
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Yeah, it's removed. Cheers.
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