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Partition Manager

Description

KDE Partition Manager is an application to help you manage the disk devices, partitions and file systems on your computer. It allows you to easily create, copy, move, delete, resize without losing data, backup and restore partitions.

Directory

References

Cloning a Disk

Description

This guide details on how we could clone a disk using KDE Partition Manager.

References

Steps

Note

To copy a source partition to a target partition of another drive, the two partitions will need to not be mounted - this makes it almost (if not entirely) impossible to do right from your host system. Hence, the rest of this guide will be done from a (Full) Manjaro KDE Plasma Live USB, which has KDE Partition Manager installed by default.

  1. Download the Manjaro KDE Plasma ISO file.

  2. Install BalenaEtcher if you haven't already. Launch the BalenaEtcher app.

  3. Flash the downloaded ISO file using BalenaEtcher to a USB drive.

  4. After flashing the ISO, attach the USB stick to the PC that has both the Source and Target drives attached.

  5. While the PC is shut down, turn on the PC, and get into the motherboard's UEFI/BIOS (usually by pressing the F2 or DEL key).

  6. In the Boot section of the UEFI, locate the Boot Override option and select the USB drive to boot into the Manjaro KDE Plasma Live USB.

Important

The target drive should be of the same capcaity or bigger than the source drive.

Caution

The following steps will wipe the target drive clean, so make sure that you have backed up all the data you need from the target drive before proceeding.

  1. Copy partitions from the Source drive to the Target drive:

    • In the Manjaro KDE Plasma Live desktop, launch the KDE Partition Manager app. You should find both the drives available there. It's important that you identify which of the two is the Source drive and the Target drive. In this guide, we'll assume that the Source drive is nvme1n1, while the Target drive is nvme0n1.

    • Delete all existing partitions found in the Target drive.

    • While referring to the partitions found in the Source drive, nvme1n1, create new partitions in the Target drive, nvme0n1 that replicates the source drive. Make sure to also get the partition flags and names right if available. Most importantly, the size allocation of each new partition on the Target drive should be the same, or bigger.

    • Right click a partition in the Source drive, select the Copy option, then right click the corresponding partition in the Target drive, and select the Paste option. Repeat this for each partition found in the Source drive.

    • Ensure that each copy has completed sucessfully with no error messages.

    • Once done, right click each of the partition in the newly cloned Target drive, and select the Properties option and locate the partition's UUID. Take note of each of their UUID values as we will need them later.

  2. Update /etc/fstab:

    • Locate the exact partition in the Target drive which is the root partition. You could do this by checking it from KDE Partition Manager, or by using the following command:

      sudo lsblk

    • In this example, the root partition of the Target drive is /dev/nvme0n1p2, and uses the btrfs filesystem.

      We will need to mount this partition in the Manjaro KDE Plasma Live USB desktop. First, we need to create a directory as the mounting point (i.e. /mnt/nvme0n1p2):

      sudo mkdir /mnt/nvme0n1p2

    • Mount the root partition to the mounting point:

      sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/nvme0n1p2

    • Make a backup of the /etc/fstab file from the root partition:

      sudo cp /mnt/nvme0n1p2/@/etc/fstab /mnt/nvme0n1p2/@/etc/fstab.bak

    • Edit the /etc/fstab file from the root partition:

      sudo nano /mnt/nvme0n1p2/@/etc/fstab

    • Replace all the old UUID values found in the fstab file with the UUID values of your new partitions in the Target drive.

      Do note that if a btrfs partition shares the same UUID with a partition from the Source drive, identify the new partition (i.e. /dev/nvme0n1p2) and generate a new UUID for it:

      btrfstune -U $(uuidgen) /dev/nvme0n1p2

      If the new fat32 (boot) partition on the Target drive shares the same UUID as the old boot partition, it should be safe for you to just delete the old boot partition from the Source drive using the KDE Partition Manager app (make sure to apply the changes after selecting the Delete option).

  3. Update GRUB:

    • After finishing all the earlier steps, you can unmount any mounted partitions (i.e. /mnt/nvme0n1p2) and shut down the KDE Plasma Live USB Desktop session:

      sudo umount /mnt/nvme0n1p2 && sudo shutdown now

    • Remove the USB stick from the PC, and turn the PC back on, and get back into the UEFI/BIOS.

    • In the Boot section, ensure that the newly cloned Target drive is set as the first in the boot order/priority.

    • Once confirmed, choose the Save & Reset option in the BIOS and let the PC reboot into the GRUB of your new Target drive.

    • Once you're in GRUB, quickly click the arrow keys of your keyboard (before it proceeds to desktop) and highlight the default boot entry of the GRUB (usually the first, top entry).

    • Once highlighted, press the E key to edit the boot entry option.

    • Locate all of the old UUID values in said entry and replace them with the new UUID values of their corresponding partitions (usually just the root partition).

    • Once updated, execute the option that boots into the desktop using your updated entry. Usually this is done by pressing Ctrl + X.

    • Once you've successfully booted into the desktop of your new drive, open the terminal to permanently update all of your new GRUB boot entries as the update we had done earlier was only temporary.

    • Before we do that, ensure that we are indeed in the newly cloned desktop by checking that our /etc/fstab file has all the correct, updated UUID values of our newly cloned Target drive:

      sudo cat /etc/fstab

    • Once we have confirmed that, create a backup of our existing GRUB config:

      sudo cp /boot/grub/grub.cfg /boot/grub/grub.cfg.bak

    • Now we can regenerate a new GRUB config to override the old, outdated one.

    • Restart your PC to confirm that the new GRUB config works, and your brand new drive and cloned desktop should be all set.

Mounting a Secondary Internal Disk

Description

This details how we could add a secondary internal drive to our computer.

Caution

This guide will lead you to wipe the secondary drive clean, make sure that you have backed up all the data you need from the secondary drive before proceeding!

Steps

  1. Launch the KDE Partition Manager application.

Note

Make sure that the secondary drive has been physically installed to the PC.

  1. Locate the secondary drive within the list of available Devices.

  2. Remove any existing partitions on the secondary drive by clicking on each partition and selecting the Delete option at the top.

  3. Select an unallocated partition and click the New button at the top to create a new partition:

    • Set the File system (i.e. btrfs).

    • Give it a Label (i.e. data).

    • Set the Size.

    • Click the OK button.

    • Click the Apply button at the top to apply the changes.

  4. Once we have prepared our drive's partition, create a mounting point for the new secondary drive (i.e. /mnt/data):

    sudo mkdir /mnt/data

  5. Identify the new partition we have created and will be mounting, and take note of its UUID value:

    sudo blkid

    Sample output:

    /dev/nvme1n1p1: LABEL="data" UUID="586e85aa-3a23-4ec4-a159-c25a5f15df20" UUID_SUB="8cd35ec7-e2a2-4a86-8a39-a2e129f88200" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="btrfs" PARTUUID="c708eb71-46b7-4de7-b396-abc55a0bfc5d"

    In this example, the UUID of the new partition is 586e85aa-3a23-4ec4-a159-c25a5f15df20.

  6. Register our secondary drive to the fstab file.

    Edit the fstab file:

    sudo nano /etc/fstab

    Add the following entry, with the new partition's UUID value (i.e. 586e85aa-3a23-4ec4-a159-c25a5f15df20):

    # data
UUID=586e85aa-3a23-4ec4-a159-c25a5f15df20   /mnt/data           btrfs   defaults                                                                                                            0 0

    [!WARNING]
    In addition to replacing the UUID value, make sure to also replace /mnt/data with the path to your actual mounting point!

  7. Reload our daemon so that our new fstab is recognised:

    sudo systemctl daemon-reload

  8. Try and mount our drive to its mounting point (i.e. /mnt/data):

    sudo mount /mnt/data

  9. If it has mounted successfully, we likely still are not able to write to it as the mounting point is owned by the root user.

    Change the ownership of the mounting point of the new partition (i.e. /mnt/data) to make it writable by our user:

    sudo chown $USER: /mnt/data

    The secondary drive should now be automatically mounted upon boot and available under the Devices section in our Dolphin file explorer application (as well as in a shell session through its mounting point).