How can I set my SSD as my boot drive and my HDD as my storage drive?

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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:

  1. 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

  1. Install Manjaro on your SSD. Do a basic installation.

  2. Boot into BIOS, change the boot order so that it uses your SSD first.

  3. Reboot into your new installation, confirm it works. Do a full update.

  4. Mount your HDD, you should be able to do so through your file manager as if it is a removable drive.

  5. Install your previous packages. (Replace the placeholders as relevant.)
    :warning: 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

  1. Move your user folder so it sits at the root of your HDD.
mv /usr/mnt/<hdd>/home/<user> /usr/mnt/<hdd>/
  1. Delete everything at the root of your HDD, except your user folder.
    :warning: 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
  1. 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
  1. Reboot. Enjoy!

B. as extra storage, keeping your main user storage in your SSD.

  1. Copy the content of your old home folder into your new one.
cp -f /usr/mnt/<hdd>/home/<user>/* ~

  1. Reboot. You should have your old configuration back.

  2. 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.

  3. 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

  4. Enjoy!

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