Installation using existing scheme with luks/btrfs

General system EndeavourOS installation
1

I am thinking about installing Endeavor using an existing scheme of volumes like this

luks and btrfs with subvolumes

/dev/nvme1n1p1: /boot
/dev/dev/nvme1n1p2: /boot/efi
@: /
@ home: /home
@data … some other subvols

I was not able to tell the installer to use

/dev/nvme1n1p1: /boot and reformat
/dev/dev/nvme1n1p2: /boot/efi and reformat
subvol @: / and recreate the subvol
(I am also happy to rename @ to @old and specify a new @ subvol for /)
subvol @home: /home as is.

Is this possible to do?

2

If you are trying to install into existing subvols, I don’t think that is possible.

If you are trying to install into an existing partition, I believe that is possible.

You would want to test this before trying it with your real data but I believe if you tell it to re-use a btrfs partition and mount that partition at at /, it will create the subvols inside that existing partition. However, if there are any duplicates it will fail.

You could edit /etc/calamares/modules/mount.conf and remove @home from the list of subvols it will try to create. As long as you rename you existing @ before starting I believe that will work.

Then you can mount @home and @data post install.

3

Thanks @dalto . Sounds good what you propose.

Installing into existing luks/btrfs is important. Before starting install I could rename existing subvols @ to @save and @home to @home.save so that later on (post-install) I could delete the @save subvol and rename back my @home.save subvol.

I will try out things in a virtual machine before doing it in real life. :slight_smile:

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4

Hm, things don’t seem to work.

I installed Endeaver using my scheme

/boot: ext4
/boot/efi: fat32 (boot flag)
/: @ subvol
/home: @home subvol

That’s fine.

Now booted again with the Endeavour ISO, ran the installer and chose Manual partitioning

I can select /dev/sda3 which is seen as LUKS. When editing I could choose a mount point / but there is no way to provide the luks passphrase. Later on the installation failed…

5

What happens if you unlock the luks partition prior to running the installer?

6

Also failure during installation

7

I have never tried it with LUKS unfortunately.

What is your end goal with the install? Why are you installing into an existing install?

8

I have an existing system (my laptop) which is installed (except /boot, /boot/efi) in btrfs subvols. The SSD is 1TB and data without the @ subvol is about 500GB.

So it is clear that I am not happy to install from scratch and then to recover 500 GB from backup into various subvols.

9

Is there a chance to do an installation from command line where I could mount fs before calling the install command?

10

You could use EnOS’ live session to do an Arch install (By the Wiki Way) and then add EnOS’ repo to it, install for EnOS specific packages and perhaps the theming if you like.

11

Thanks @pebcak . Sounds good. I think I will go this way.

Of course, I will first play with things in a virt machine. The good side effect will be that in the end I know much more about the “arch way” in general…

In the end I will report back here.

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12

Over time I had changed my mind and did a new install on the SSD. Afterwards I restored stuff.

Of course, I had to deal with issues here and there when customizing things the way they were before. But this is business as usual in such situations.

So, finally all went well.

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