By recently I mean a week ago, since then I have installed a bunch of games, files and programs that I don’t want to lose. Additionally my internet is quite slow so I don’t want to have to reinstall everything all over again because it will take a lot of time.
Sorry for answering a day later, I didn’t get any notifications for the forum sdb is my second drive (it being my SSD) it’s not formatted currently. As for how I installed Manjaro initially I used the ‘Erase disk’ option.
Blockquote
[remi@remi-PC ~]$ lsblk -af
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0
loop1
loop2
loop3
loop4
loop5
loop6
loop7
sda
├─sda1 ext4 1.0 6d1158e5-3997-4f8f-ae8d-74129b8b54fe 538,6G 16% /
└─sda2 swap 1 swap 34d57d9f-5657-4437-bbb5-82001cdf1e21 [SWAP]
sdb
sdc
So, this shows that your current whole system, including your user files, are on a single partition. This shall be taken into account for the migration.
What’s that drive? Is it large enough so you may use it as (temporary) backup drive for your current?
from what I understand it is an unallocated partition that shows up in gparted
It doesn’t end with a number, so it should be a drive.
inxi -D
inxi -D
Drives: Local Storage: total: 922.22 GiB used: 105.26 GiB (11.4%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Seagate model: ST3750528AS size: 698.64 GiB
ID-2: /dev/sdb vendor: SanDisk model: SSD PLUS 240GB size: 223.58 GiB
@remisence As you are on a live session, /dev/sdc must be the flash drive, which is locked for such operations. So your SSD must be /dev/sdb.
No I am on a Manjaro installation. And yes /dev/sdb is my SSD
ok well, then the loops here must be snap applications… ?
I don’t know what you mean by “snap applications”, please elaborate.
That’s weird… Well, we’ll do without.
So, for safety sake, since you don’t seem familiar with partition tweaking yet, i suggest the following plan:
- Export your current list of packages.
This will save the list of the currently explicitly installed packages in a packages.txt file in your home folder. The dependencies will be excluded, as they shall be automatically installed when you want to install them back.
pacman -Qeq > ~/packages.txt
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Install Manjaro on your SSD. Do a basic installation.
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Boot into BIOS, change the boot order so that it uses your SSD first.
-
Reboot into your new installation, confirm it works. Do a full update.
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Mount your HDD, you should be able to do so through your file manager as if it is a removable drive.
-
Install your previous packages. (Replace the placeholders as relevant.)
If you have errors, do read them. Some packages may not be available to today, or have conflicts with your new installation. Alternatively, you can install those packages manually through your package manager, from the list in the file.
cat /usr/mnt/<hdd>/home/<user>/packages.txt | pamac install
At this point, there are two ways you can use your HDD.
A. as your main user storage – though you will unlikely fill your whole SSD as a system partition in my opinion
- Move your user folder so it sits at the root of your HDD.
mv /usr/mnt/<hdd>/home/<user> /usr/mnt/<hdd>/
- Delete everything at the root of your HDD, except your user folder.
This is where you can lose all your user data! If you prefer, you can do so manually through your file manager.
cd /usr/mnt/<hdd>
ls . | grep -v <user> | rm -rf
- Define your partition on your HDD as your soon-to-be new home partition.
sudo echo 'UUID=6d1158e5-3997-4f8f-ae8d-74129b8b54fe /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2' >> /etc/fstab
- Reboot. Enjoy!
B. as extra storage, keeping your main user storage in your SSD.
- Copy the content of your old home folder into your new one.
cp -f /usr/mnt/<hdd>/home/<user>/* ~
-
Reboot. You should have your old configuration back.
-
Now we can clean the HDD to make it an extra storage. The fastest way to do this is to reformat it. You can do so with gparted.
-
If you want to, you can setup your cleaned drive to be mounted at boot. I’ll let your follow my guide on that part, where and how you want to do it.
[HowTo] Use multiple partitions / drives in your Manjaro installation -
Enjoy!
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Snaps are this: https://snapcraft.io/ , which can also be installed by PAMAC. That are image files, which get mounted and executed isolated in a sandbox environment and therefore the loops.
EDIT: I agree with @maycne.sonahoz that this would a be good idea, if you want a clean re-installation, but cloning is also a good option.
I don’t recall installing any snap packages to begin with
I’m not familiar with cloning tools, and dd won’t work since the target drive is smaller than the source.
I’ll let someone with experience in that suggesting a plan with it. 
This is an absolutely great guide. I just stumbled on this while browsing the forum and this is a great explanation and very well written up. Want to give you more than just a like, so you also get my today’s kudos. These are the sort of guides that really make it easier for newbee users to get to know Linux.
Thank you very much this worked. Well… so far… I haven’t got around to cleaning the HDD yet
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