this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
508 points (94.7% liked)

linuxmemes

19680 readers
72 users here now

I use Arch btw


Sister communities:

Community rules

  1. Follow the site-wide rules and code of conduct
  2. Be civil
  3. Post Linux-related content
  4. No recent reposts

Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Alt text: O'RLY? generated book cover with a donkey, navy blue accent, header: "It's only free if you don't value your time", title: "Handling Arch Linux Failures", subtitle: "Mom, please cancel my today's agenda!"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My arch install is from 2015. It just works, why should I reinstall?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

@[email protected] mentioned cloning the drive and moving it to another computer. I imagine reinstalling would be easier at that point, that's why I asked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Well not really, cloning is much easier than reinstalling and then configuring everything again...

I have LVM set up from the start, so usually I just copy the /boot partition to the new disk, and the rest is in a LVM volume group, so I just use pvmove from old disk to the new one, fix the bootloader and fstab UUIDs, and Im ready to reboot from new disk, while I didnt even left my running system, no live USB needed or anything. (Of course I messed it up a first few times, so had to fix from a live OS).

But once you know all the quirks, I can be up and ready on a new drive withing 20mins (depends mainly on the pvmove), with all the stuff preserved and set

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's really cool, how can I learn more about LVM and that kinda stuff?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

There is many tutorials and how tos, this is quite nice one:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LVM

BTW some filesystems like btrfs and ZFS already have a similar functionality built in...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

And reinstalling the packages, moving over all the configs, setting up the partitions and moving the data over? (Not in this order, of course)

Cloning a drive would just require you to plug both the old and new to the same machine, boot up (probably from a live image to avoid issues), running a command and waiting until it finishes. Then maybe fixing up the fstab and reinstalling the bootloader, but those are things you need to do to install the system anyways.

I think the reason you'd want to reinstall is to save time, or get a clean slate without any past config mistakes you've already forgotten about, which I've done for that very reason, especially since it was still my first, and less experienced, install.