Arch Linux

mrconfused

Member

Registered: 2023-06-17

Posts: 38

How to migrate Arch to a larger drive with partitions out of order?

Hello,

I have Arch installed on a USB stick that I want to copy to a larger drive.

If the partitions were in the right order (UEFI Boot, Swap, Root) I would use dd to copy everything and then use GParted to extend the root partition to the size of the new drive.

However USB stick install is in the wrong order: Swap, Root, UEFI Boot. So I as far as I can tell this above method won't work

How do I then do this? I have some fairly simple ideas how to do it, but I really don't want to mess it up.

Would very much appreciate some help.

Thanks

p.s. Once I have copied the install, do I then need to change the UUID of the destination drive to a new value before editing the partition with GParted?

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 18,868

Re: How to migrate Arch to a larger drive with partitions out of order?

Have you looked at Migrate installation to new hardware File copying?

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,070

Re: How to migrate Arch to a larger drive with partitions out of order?

Fwwi, as long as the new partitions are at least the size of the old ones and you don't mind preserving the existing inode fragmentation, you could dd the old partition into the new one, ie. eg. "dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/dev/sdb1"
This will preserve the partition UUIDs but not the PARTUUIDs
It will also not be necessary for the swap partition (just mkswap, it's transactional data anyway)

Using rsync has the benefits of not having the adjust the filesystem afterwards and you're also defragmenting the data.

copy everything and then use GParted to extend the root partition to the size of the new drive

Can btw. imply massive data shifts and take longer than the copy itself.

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system72

Member

Registered: 2025-11-22

Posts: 572

Website

Re: How to migrate Arch to a larger drive with partitions out of order?

maybe it would be better to use ddrescue for this

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Disk_c … g_ddrescue

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