Moving the boots of a Win 10 dual boot to an SSD

Hello everyone, on my system I am currently running a dual boot between Windows 10 and Manjaro, all kept on a 2Tb hard drive. I recently bought a 128Gb SSD and would like to move the boots and other relevant partitions (My system is manually partitioned) for both OS’ onto it while keeping the rest of the data on the hard drive (Manjaro’s home partition and Windows’ msftdata partition) Any help on how to go about this safely and without accidentally screwing up my drive would be appreciated, and I’ll be glad to provide any system info needed.

Hi and welcome to Manjaro. Not that I have any experience with this, but I appreciate folks who are not afraid of pushing the envelope, so let’s see how it goes.

What does the 2TB drive look like?

$ lsblk -f

I have ‘rearranged’ partitions to a different drive by manually copying them over, using gparteds copy/paste. You’ll need to edit fstab to allow the new uuid to be recognised afterwards but for the manjaro part it’s no big deal. However, I’m sure your Win would not survive moving any of its partitions in gparted. If indeed this is possible, that would have to be done in Win.

I recon the simplest and safest way is to plug in your ssd and reinstall manjaro with your new partition layout and the same graphics setup as on your old manjaro, then replace the empty new ‘home’ folder with your old home folder. Now install all the app packages you had installed on your old manjaro from a package list. pacman/Tips and tricks - ArchWiki

So to clarify, what you’re saying is that I should copy and paste Windows using its own partition manager and then reinstall Manjaro so I can more safely reorganize the partitions? That all makes sense to me however a little more detail on how to go about the home folder ordeal would be appreciated.

Yes, but if that is even possible in Win 10, I cannot say. Based on my experience (‘unmovable files’ in partition manager) I doubt it’s possible without reinstalling. If you want to go that way do it first, then reinstall manjaro.

If not, the next best thing would be reinstalling only manjaro to ssd as described above. It’s safe and shouldn’t take long.

After reinstalling manjaro to ssd and setting up the graphics exactly like in your old system you end up with an almost empty ‘home’ folder. Without even opening your new browser (and thereby creating a new profile) open your old ‘home’ folder and copy its entire content (including the ‘hidden’ dot files and folders) into the new empty ‘home’.
If you now open your browser it will look like your old one. However, all explicitly installed apps (package list) of your old system need first to be installed. Once they are they will use their custom files from your new home directory and should work and feel like on your old system. Only faster :smiley:

I’ll do that then as I rarely use Windows 10 to begin with, I can do without the extra speed there lol. Thanks for your help!

Ok so, I went through the process of reorganizing my partitions and everything but when I got to the installation it got stuck on 1% while resizing and has been stuck there ever since, I don’t know if its an issue with how I partitioned or Calamares or what, and I don’t wanna risk just shutting off the PC.