Migrate laptop from EnOS to EnOS, best practices?

General system Newbie
1

OK, so I’ve been running EndeavourOS as my main system since May (nearly a year) and I’m ready to let go of my dual-boot Win11 setup for good. The 4TB drive I have in my laptop is set up with 8 total partitions, four for Win11 and four for EnOS (/EFI, /swap, /[root], and /Home) with no encryption on any partition. The new install will have encryption on /Home.

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I had planned on cloning the root and home partitions to a spare drive using Acronis drive image (which I used to migrate from the original 1TB drive to the 4TB drive), but Acronis is giving an error that my root and home partitions have errors and refuses to copy them anywhere. When I boot into the EnOS live ISO installer and run FSCK on the partitions they have no errors. One option I have is to nuke all the partitions except for /home, then setup EnOS on the remaining space, then copy the contents of /home(old) to /home(new) then delete /home(old) and expand /home into the now empty space. But I figure my safest option is to back up the contents of root & home to a separate external drive, nuke all the partitions on the drive, set up EnOS from the live ISO, then copy all my data back after the setup.

I’m in no particular hurry to get this done, everything seems to be running perfectly fine.
But I know that a lot of you folks have done this process hundreds of times, and have “lessons learned” or best-practices to pass on. I always say “a wise man learns from his mistakes, but a wiser man also learns from the mistakes of others.”

So…whatcha got? :nerd_face:

2

Assuming you have your important data backed up already, I would just delete the partitions you don’t need and move and expand the other partitions.

You shouldn’t need to reinstall.

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3

Would that not just mess with the boot menu? Can LUKS be set up whenever?
I’ll admit, I’m a little worried by the file-system errors reported by Acronis.

4

The boot menu should be fine but it can fixed even if it isn’t.

That being said, I missed that you wanted to add encryption. That makes it more complicated.

It is definitely easier to backup to external and restore it after in that case.

You may not need the contents of root but it won’t hurt to have it.

5

Or if you’re comfortable (or willing to get comfortable) with links and symbolic links, just reformat partitions and map them into your existing filesystem. I choose to have my Documents and Games folders both be links to partitions on other drive (to keep my stuff away from the distro partition). Unixes are quire flexible and can be leveraged considerably with the proper imagination.

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