Okay, so I want to do something stupid and I’d like the input of smarter people to make sure I don’t screw it up. This is what I’ve got:
p1: EFI partition, p2: Linux install, p3: /home partition, p4: other Linux install, p5: another Linux install. Long story.
I use the third install (on p5) exclusively now. I want to clean up the mess seen above by moving it to p2 (currently occupied by the first install), and removing p4 and p5. What I thought I’d do (on a live USB) is:
- Overwrite p2 with the data of p5. (probably with rsync?)
- Edit fstab on p2 to change the UUID of the root partition to the new one.
- Try to boot from p2
- If it works, remove p4 and p5
Would that work the way I want it to? Anything obvious I’m missing?
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I’ve done this before, it’s definitely a bit of a hack but it went without a hitch for me. Depending on your bootloader you’ll probably have to edit/regenerate your bootloader config as well.
Good call on rsync, just make sure to use the right flags. I’m on Arch so I used the command from the Arch page on full system backup using rsync, but it should work for any distro.
When rsync copying the active root I like to bind mount / to /mnt/root_fs first. This avoids the issue with needing to exclude folders with sub-mounts and will expose files to copy that might be hidden by the mounts.
I think your idea is pretty much correct. One step that might be missing is updating your boot loader to boot into the correct partition, depending on your configuration.
