Migrate Manjaro to another computer

Support
1

Hello Everyone,

I’m an happy Manjaro user, I installed my system 1 year ago with Manjaro Architect.
The system where Manjaro is installed (my home computer) is a bit old and I was able to buy a brand new upgrade kit (Mainboard/CPU/RAM) for Christmas…

I know that is technically possible to take the ssd where Manjaro is installed and plugin into the new mainboard, it is called top to bottom migration.
But I have several questions…

The new computer is globally different to the old one :

  • The old one was using Bios and MBR, the new one UEFI and GPT (for the first drive which is an M2 drive)
  • The /boot partition was on the master disk on my old system but I plan to keep the drive in the old system.
  • The old architecture was Intel based, the new one is AMD based

My idea is to :

  1. Make a backup with clonezilla (to be more secure)
  2. Place the SSD into the new system
  3. Chroot into the old system
  4. Execute a new hardware detection with mhwd… I don’t know how to do it ?
  5. Create a new /boot partition, mount the EFI partition… I don’t know how to edit de fstab to add it ? Maybe regenerate it with genfstab ?
  6. Execute the grub restore procedure

Do you think it is a good idea ? Do you have any advice ?

Do you think it will be better to reinstall everything and get the data back from a backup ? (bottom to top approch)
Do you have an idea how to get a complete list of the package that it is installed on my old system to automate the installation ?

Any help or advice will be really appreciated.
Regards,

Louis

2

Welcome @Tuxbe,

Yes.
Its simply going to be cleaner/easier … especially when we get into the BIOS vs EFI stuff … thats usually enough to warrant a reinstall (though apparently it is possible to convert given enough handiwork).

There are a number of manual ways … ex:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks#List_of_installed_packages

And I will also leave this here for you as it contains both pkglist and plasma ‘config cloning’ features:

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3

Hello,

Thank you cscs ! I used your advice to save my Plasma config and the list of all my packages.
But before reinstalling my system from scratch I wanted to make a try !
And… It was a success :slight_smile: !

To do it :

  1. I Installed the 5.9.11 kernel and all the Manjaro updates on my old system (I’m running the stable branch)
  2. I used CloneZilla to clone my boot partition on an external drive.
  3. I placed the old SSD drive containing my old Manjaro system (/) into the new system. (Note that my old SSD is using an MBR partitioning system)
  4. I booted the new system on Windows and shrank the Windows partition to hold the old boot partition (NVME drive)
  5. I used CloneZilla to clone the boot partition from the external drive to the newly created one
  6. I booted the Manjaro live cd and mount manually all known partitions
  7. I created the /boot/efi folder and mount the efi partition
  8. I generated a new fstab by using fstabgen -U /mnt/etc/fstab
  9. I added the swap mount point
  10. I chrooted into the system and run the restore grub procedure as if my system was in UEFI before
  11. I rebooted the system and correct the GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE to see the grub menu

Et Voila ! Everything is working well even the new hardware (integrated audio and networking).
The only problem I’m encountering for the moment is :
EDAC amd64: Error: F0 not found, device 0x1650 (broken BIOS?)
I think it is because I’m using a brand new AMD 5600x CPU, I need to wait for a kernel update.

I hope it can help another user :wink:.

Regards.

Louis

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