Migration to SSD and reconfig of filesystem setup

2017/10/15

Categories: Laptop Tags: SSD Arch

Migration to SSD and reconfig of filesystem setup

I was finally about to migrate to a SSD on my laptop when I started to think about switching to Btrfs and getting rid of LVM while I’m at it. To achieve that I tried different things but came down to the following. At this point I also had the SSD installed in my laptop already and the old HDD pluggable with SATA-to-USB adapter.

Basic idea: Via live usb, create /boot and LUKS container (with /) on SSD. Format / and /boot to Btrfs. Migrate data with rsync. Do the usual steps at the end of an arch installation (fstab, bootloader, mkinitcpio etc).

Detailed steps: (based on ArchWiki:Dm-crypt-Encrypting an entire system)

Everything should work now. Additionally I removed pacman -Rs hdapsd shock protection for mechanical disk because that’s obviously not necessary anymore.

Last friendly disclaimer: The way I described above is just the way I fiddled for my specific situation. Sadly I’m just a linux enthusiast and not an expert so there might be design flaws or other errors included.