I’m upgrading my my old laptot (from 2007 lol) from 80GB HDD to a 120GB SDD.
My current setup is bit like this:
sda1 w/ Zorin Lite (about 37 GB)
sda2 w/ Manjaro XFCE (about 39 GB) this is the boot partition w/ Manjaro GRUB.
Swap partition is 3GB (same as RAM)
Both OS have their own /home parttition.
I would like to clone both OS but this time with a separate /home partition shared by both OS for my 120 GB.
Something like this:
sda1 Zorin Lite (35/40GB)
sda2 Manjaro XFCE (35/40GB)
swap file the same 3GB
Sda3 /home shared folder takes the rest of SDD space.
What is the best way to do this?
I have Rescuezilla and Clonezilla on USB (ventoy) Live drive and the latest version of both OSs
I tried to clone a Win10 drive that I upgraded (from 120GB to 240GB SSD) and it didn’t work!
Had to make a fresh Win 10 install.
Should I do a fresh instal of both Zorin/Manjaro OS the way I want?
If so, if I copy the .config files os both OS from the old 80GD HDD to the fresh install on the 240GB SSD wil it work and have the same settings?
Don’t do that — seriously, don’t do that. It will create conflicts due to subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) differences between the two systems.
Just to give you an example, the UID of your user account may differ between both systems, or there might be minor version differences in certain software components that result in a slightly different syntax of their respective user-owned configuration files, and so on.
What you could do is create a common partition for user data — not configuration data! — from both your distributions, and mount this partition to a directory inside your home directory on both systems, e.g. /home/jesus/Data.
But of course, you would still need some free space for that, and if you don’t have any, then you’re going to have to shrink one of the partitions to make room for that. If 3 GiB is enough space, then you could reformat the existing swap partition as an ext4 data partition and then use a swap file on the root filesystem in either distribution instead of the dedicated swap partition you have now.
I better install from scratch then.
I have been using both OS with no issues.
I just want this /home partition to be readily acessible by both OSs.
This partition would be just for data and media not .config files.
Just leave enough room for an extra data partition when you reinstall, and format this partition as ext4. Make sure you write down the UUID of this new partition somewhere, and that you mind the difference between uppercase and lowercase characters, because UNIX is case-sensitive.
Then after installing, create a directory/folder in your home directory — e.g. /home/jesus/Data — in both systems and add a line for the data partition to be mounted at /home/jesus/Data to the /etc/fstab, also in both operating systems.
You can edit /etc/fstab with any editor — most GUI editors will prompt you for the administrative password when saving a root-owned file — but if you do it with a console-based editor like nano, then you’ll need to start the editor with sudo privileges.
I’m having a lot o trouble doing this.
I cloned my previous 80GB HDD to the 120 GB SSD.
Moved to 3GB Swap to the end of the SSD and formata the unallocated space to ext4.
I did what said and can boot to manjaro on sda2. I can boo to zorin in sda1. sda3 is da ~data partition I wnat to mount automatically.
Was able to boot to majaro by copying the fstab file from zorin but it gives a erro message I can’t read It show for half a second before manjaro login.
This is my fstab file now:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=0842f047-cca4-473d-9e04-ca63ff88dca6 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda4 during installation
UUID=b1988a61-f91d-4f1d-bc4c-fe7f69c1395c none swap sw 0 0
If I add the UUID=taken-from-gparted-propreties /home/jesus/Data ext4 defaults,ssd,noatime 0 0
I can’t boot to manajro…
It say something error cannot mount sda3…
