Moved My Manjaro Installation From an Old Hard Drive to a 1TB NVMe SSD

[Unison]

Moved My Manjaro Installation From an Old Hard Drive to a 1TB NVMe SSD​

I've finally moved my Manjaro installation from an old Toshiba hard drive onto a 1TB Crucial P310 NVMe SSD, and it turned into a much bigger job than I expected!

The first problem happened before I could even start the migration.

I fitted the new NVMe SSD using a PCIe adapter, but the PC would then freeze on the Gigabyte BIOS screen. Even a wired keyboard wouldn't respond, so I couldn't press Delete or F12.

Remove the NVMe and the PC would boot normally again.

After quite a bit of troubleshooting, including testing the PCIe adapter and changing BIOS settings, I eventually updated the motherboard BIOS. After the update, the Crucial NVMe was detected correctly and the PC booted normally with it installed.

That finally allowed me to move Manjaro.

The old and new drives​

My existing Manjaro installation was on an old Toshiba drive:

TOSHIBA MQ01ABD032
320GB

The new drive is:

Crucial P310
1TB NVMe
CT1000P310SSD8
I created a GPT partition table on the NVMe with:

• 512MB FAT32 EFI partition
• Remaining space as an ext4 Manjaro partition

The existing Manjaro system was then copied to the NVMe using rsync, preserving permissions, ACLs, extended attributes and hard links.

After the copy completed, I changed the UUIDs in the new installation's /etc/fstab so that / and /boot/efi pointed to the new NVMe partitions rather than the old Toshiba drive.

I then entered the copied installation with chroot and installed GRUB onto the NVMe's EFI partition:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=Manjaro-NVMe --recheck
Then regenerated the GRUB configuration:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
and rebuilt the initramfs:

mkinitcpio -P
After rebooting, the moment of truth was:

findmnt /
Manjaro reported the root filesystem as:

/dev/nvme0n1p2
Success.

Manjaro is now running from the 1TB Crucial NVMe rather than the old hard drive.

One lesson I took from the whole exercise is don't erase the old installation immediately.

I'm keeping the old Manjaro drive untouched for a few days while I reboot and test everything. Once I'm completely satisfied that the NVMe installation is reliable, I can wipe and reuse the old drives.

It took a fair bit of troubleshooting to get there, particularly with the BIOS refusing to boot with the NVMe installed, but it was worth it in the end.

The old mechanical Manjaro drive has finally retired from active duty.

 

[CyborJaX]

Well done matey I have done a few of them transfer myself in the past you certainly had a task there all down to the old BIOS pleased you got there bud. Key note here check compatibility.

 

[Unison]

Well done matey I have done a few of them transfer myself in the past you certainly had a task there all down to the old BIOS pleased you got there bud. Key note here check compatibility.

Was a right mare just wasn't sure if the 1TB Crucial NVMe was a dud so had to keep trying till finally got it up and running .
Worth it in the end

 

[Janobi]

Would it not be better to use a smaller drive for the OS, and keep the 1Tb for other stuff within the OS?

When i've done this, I usually get a 128Gb drive for the OS, and then add additional drives for my stuff. Mount as you want then.

 

[Unison]

Would it not be better to use a smaller drive for the OS, and keep the 1Tb for other stuff within the OS?

When i've done this, I usually get a 128Gb drive for the OS, and then add additional drives for my stuff. Mount as you want then.

Yes, that's definitely a good way of doing it, and I did consider separating the OS and data.

In this case I've decided to keep Manjaro on the 1TB NVMe and use the whole drive. It gives me plenty of space for the OS, applications and my home directory, while my larger collections such as music and backups are already kept on separate drives.

I also like the simplicity of having Manjaro on one drive without having to manage another SSD and mount point.

A 128GB/256GB OS drive plus a separate 1TB data drive would certainly make sense though, especially if you reinstall or change distributions regularly.

 

[Janobi]

Yes, that's definitely a good way of doing it, and I did consider separating the OS and data.

In this case I've decided to keep Manjaro on the 1TB NVMe and use the whole drive. It gives me plenty of space for the OS, applications and my home directory, while my larger collections such as music and backups are already kept on separate drives.

I also like the simplicity of having Manjaro on one drive without having to manage another SSD and mount point.

A 128GB/256GB OS drive plus a separate 1TB data drive would certainly make sense though, especially if you reinstall or change distributions regularly.

1TB is huge for an OS, and linux certainly isn't going to use that anytime soon. You could have 20 installations of linux on a 1Tb drive. Understand about the additional drive, but iirc, you always mount things in linux? Like you mount things in /var? Or perhaps that's just enterprise situations.


As i've said before, im not a linux head, I know my way around and use it for work, but nothing more.

 

[Unison]

1TB is huge for an OS, and linux certainly isn't going to use that anytime soon. You could have 20 installations of linux on a 1Tb drive. Understand about the additional drive, but iirc, you always mount things in linux? Like you mount things in /var? Or perhaps that's just enterprise situations.


As i've said before, im not a linux head, I know my way around and use it for work, but nothing more.

think i will look into this very new to Manjaro (Linux) altogether so thank you for the guidance .