Curiosity killed the cat as I tried a series of things…
- I figured that with two “cloned drives” (assumption being they were identical) that I would drop the “/” partition on /dev/nvme1n1
- I rebooted and through the F11 boot menu I selected the “UEFI Boot - /dev/nvme2n1”
- Other than an initial desktop issue (left monitor black/blank, right monitor contained the left’s wallpaper and empty desktop, and the old right wallpaper and desktop shortcuts were gone… re-seating one of the DP connections seemed to correct the desktops as expected) I had a successful boot
- I wanted to confirm in the “kde partition manager” GUI that both the “/boot/efi” and “/” partitions were locked/mounted (which they were)… but I ran into an oddity as the tool told me that it couldn’t touch one of the NTFS partitions on my windows drive (/dev/nvme0n1) because ntfs-3g was required… I checked PAMAC and it indicated it was installed, so I selected the option to reinstall it and that seemed to resolve the oddity.
- Since this looked like success, I killed the fat32 “boot/efi” partition on /dev/nvme1n1 and rebooted
- Noticed this time in the F11 boot menu that both the Manjaro and “UEFI Boot - /dev/nvme1n1” options were removed.
- I selected the “UEFI Boot - /dev/nvme2n1” option and Manjaro loaded successfully once again… although I had to pull a DP cable to correct the desktops again
- I rebooted one more time, confirmed “UEFI Boot - /dev/nvme2n1” was the only linux boot option, selected to go into the BIOS instead, looked through the HD boot options, and noticed there was an “Ubuntu - /dev/nvme2n1” entry that was not making it into the F11 boot menu… which was really curious as I’m pretty sure Ubuntu wasn’t one of the distro’s I loaded
- So I manually added the “Ubuntu - /dev/nvme2n1” entry as a boot option, saved BIOS, and rebooted
- I selected this “ubuntu” option from the F11 boot menu, and was presented with a GRUB prompt… I suspect this is why it was suppressed from the boot menu… GRUB is not 100% happy with with the HD change, and that unbuntu might have just been a grub default entry that’s going no where
- This left me wondering how my booting into Manjaro was still working, but I’m not going to look that gift-horse in the mouth… I rebooted, entered the BIOS, reversed my force of the “ubuntu” entry, saved/rebooted, F11 booted into “UEFI Boot - /dev/nvme2n1” successfully, and had to pull the DP cable again to correct the desktops
So I’ve learned some things, confirmed some theories (I think the truth lives somewhere between scenario 1 and 2 in my OP), and created new questions. The good news is that I have a booting Manjaro on /dev/nvme2n1 like I wanted, as well as having /dev/nvme1n1 now dedicated fully as an ext4 TimeShift drive… and my revised questions are…
- Have I opened a can of worms? might there be other “ntfs-3g” niggles where I may have to reinstall applications/libraries/components to truly be up and functioning 100 percent? Should I really just start over and reinstall Manjaro from scratch? I’m hoping not.
- Might my reset KDE theme completely post also provide an answer to the odd desktop loading issue that corrects after a DP cable reset (unplug/plug)? I suspect this issue might have pre-existed the cloning as I don’t recall rebooting prior to it, and I do recall a moment where I had reversed my DP cables as I tried to work through a context menu opening on the wrong monitor thing… and when I reversed the DP cables that caused the exact same desktop issue, so I un-reversed them… so, I may have created the desktop issue and just not known until reboot… or is there some “commit” I can force to re-save the KDE plasma settings that I assume changed after the DP cable was re-seated?
- Are there some steps I can perform to correct grub (if that’s truly what’s required) to restore the “Manjaro” F11 boot option (overwriting/correcting the ubuntu entry the BIOS finds)? I think the answer(s) may lay in this wiki I found, but it’s covering a lot of scenarios, giving a lot of suggestions, and it’s just not clear to me which parts would actually improve things instead of making them worse. chroot versus Manjaro-chroot versus reinstall grub… lions and tigers and bears… oh my!