External drive to system drive?

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1

So, I have Manjaro KDE on a external drive. Can I transfer that from a External Drive to a internal one? I am planning to customize how I want then put it one my internal. What would be the best way to do that? To backup the external onto Rescuezilla seems like ir would be good? The mouse curser is so tiny, I am gonna have some one else up the size for me at first.

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Hi @Edward78,

Yes. It’s dead normal copying of stuff.

Investigate midnight commander for accomplishing it easier in CLI, then the size of four mouse cursor doesn’t matter.

It’s even in the extra repository for you:

$ pamac search mc
[...]
mc  4.8.31-2 [Installed]                                                   extra
    A file manager that emulates Norton Commander

It’s also possible to use rsync:

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

Edit:

Although, the more I think of it, the more I reckon Clonezilla is probably the better option for you, because AFAIK it also takes care of any UUIDs that might be neccessary, where with copying everything manually you’d have also have to do that manually…

Edit #2:

Also see the Archwiki article regarding disk cloning:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Disk_cloning#Versatile_cloning_solutions

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3

The first answer ton this question gives a good step-by-step description of how to do this.

Though if you have a UEFI system (which you will have, unless it’s quite an old computer) you’ll also need to tweak the GRUB install to get everything set up right, otherwise the BIOS will still want to get the bootloader from the external drive. I haven’t looked into this, but I’m sure a quick web search will find you some instructions.

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Sorry, what? Please use actual words, not invented abbreviations. The more clear and concise one is, the better others can help.

I’ve made the appropriate edits myself since I just realized the timeout for editing may have transpired. Note that I have not corrected any spelling mistakes, please also be aware of those in the future. :wink:

Reminder:

7

@Edward78

CloneZilla has never failed me.

I’ll add a point that may be often overlooked. CloneZilla will create an identical clone of a disk or partition (including the UUID’s) - Because of this, it’s best not to have both the original and the clone connected when you boot your machine. This is also one of the reasons it’s recommended to run CloneZilla only from a bootable disk of some kind.

That is all. Cheers.

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