Hello to all.
I am a Linux noob. But I decided to go straight to the arch and now I have a question.
I have a situation where I have an SSD as the main drive and an HDD as a storage drive on my laptop.
Now I want to set the partition settings for installing Arch so that all the information of the operating system and the home folder, etc. are all on the SSD and the hard disk work as a storage drive. So should I create a single partition during installation for the HDD? And should I mount it to somthing or not? I would appreciate any help
Are you already running Arch? If so, no need to reinstall. If you aren’t, then yes, format both and use the ssd as / and the hdd as /home. In arch, that would be just the point where you mount the partitions. You mount /dev/sda2 to /mnt, mkdir /mnt/home, then mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/home. There are other steps in the way with the boot and so, that you need to mount as well. Then you chroot to mnt and install arch as normal.
If you already have it installed, just shutdown your PC, boot any live-boot USB of ubuntu or arch, mount both your ssd and hdd, let’s say, mkdir /mnt/ssd, mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/ssd, then mkdir /mnt/hdd, mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/hdd. Copy the contents of /mnt/hdd/home to /mnt/ssd/home/. Then edit /mnt/ssd/etc/fstab and comment the line containing the home mount point by adding a # at the start of the line.
Moving from the SSD to HDD is just that in reverse, you copy the contents from ssd home to hdd home, then create a fstab entry.
Would be nice if you can explain what is the exact thing you want to do, as I didn’t feel like writing commands for 3 different things.
No, I’m not running Arch right now. And the thing is that with the method you said, the HDD drive will be used as the Home directory, while I don’t want to use this drive as a special directory and I want it to be like an external hard drive only for data storage.
maybe, the way that I’m thinking isn’t right? If that is the case I’ll would be grateful if you could guide me in the right direction
If you just want to use the HDD as a storage device, then that’s easy. Just follow the normal Arch installation guide, install everything on the ssd, then when you are in your installed environment after the reboot, just open up your file explorer, like Dolphin or Nautilus and click on the drive partition. It will usually get mounted in /media/your-user/disk-something-or-another-uuid
You can also mount it manually on your system. If there are no partitions on the drive, you need to format it. If there are ntfs partitions, I think linux may be able to read those, so just mount it like usual. If no partitions, just make a partition or two, then format them however you want. NFTS if you want to use it on windows, ext4 if you are fine with just using it on Linux.
