I recently decided to switch from Windows 11 to Manjaro KDE. I fell in love with Manjaro easily but it is terribly slow especially compared to Windows 11 which is installed on an SSD. I want to move Windows installation to a SATA drive, and then move the Manjaro installation to the SSD.
Cloning SSD (Windows 11) to SATA woudn’t be so problematic as the SATA drive/partition will be a larger partition. But this Manjaro installation is on a 320GB SATA and I want to clone it on 120GB SSD. I will be using CloneZilla Disk-Disk/Partition-Partition Cloning.
What is the best way to get this done?
Dealing with a windows partition is easy, depending on the data I could choose a smaller size partition but enough to hold the data. Ignore the warning and proceed.
if I had to do the tasks you want to do I would choose another path. I think it is easier to copy(backup) the files of your home-directory. Then move your Win11 to the HDD as planed. Check if your Win11 install works (if still needed). And then do a fresh install of Manjaro on the SSD which whould not take longer then an half hour.
After install, before reboot you should just copy back you saved home-directory to the new installation. And your are done.
cp -rp source target
For copy your can simply use the program ‘cp’ in a terminal. Just be sure to use the two switches ‘-r’ and ‘-p’ to copy also sub-directories and all rights and timestamps.
In this example ‘~/*’ is your current home-directory and ‘/run/media/username/your-pen-drive/backup-home/’ is the place where you want to store your backup. Be sure that the target filesystem is an linux filesystem like ‘ext4’, otherwise the file-permissions will not be stored correctly.
If you want to do it like planned with clonezilla I sadly cant help you, cause I have no expierience with that software but perhaps someone else.
Using live GRUB, check if your Manjaro installation actually fits 120GB
If it does, resize the partition accordingly (make it a little less than 120GB, because actual disk size will not be accurately 120GB, you can either really check both size in bytes for maximum accuracy or just take a safe number like 100GB)
Move Windows to SATA (I don’t know what you mean by this, as SATA can be either HDD or SSD)
Clear Windows partition on SSD (no idea if required, but CloneZilla does recognize partition boundary) by deleting the filesystem
Reboot into CloneZilla
Clone Manjaro partition to SSD
After this, you might need bootloader reinstall for both OSes, but just check first if they just work. Modern installation should use UUID so moving partitions even across disks will not break the connection between bootloaders and OSes.
Point of order … just to mention that SATA is a connection type, like IDE … I am guessing your SSD is SATA as well … you might mean compared to a spinning disk, or hard disk drive ‘HDD’.
You can use Timeshift to make a backup of you current manjaro install.
Then boot up into live CD of manjaro and run Timeshift instead; select the backup and install it on the SSD.
