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Installing a new arch instance from an existing instance without the installation media

I had an epiphany that if you are already running Arch, you can install Arch on a new drive using your current installation as a baseline instead of using bootable media. This basically works through a combination of 3 concepts:

  1. pacman will allow you to specify a target install location via the -r argument. Doing so will allow you install pacman on a clean drive.
  2. Using the mount command to mount proc and sys, etc.
  3. Switching to the new drive via chroot. The key difference between chroot and arch-chroot is that arch-chroot does step #2 for you.

NOTE: in the examples below, _ is aliased to sudo.

I have been running with this configuration for several months now, and reguarly pull in rolling updates via pacman -Syu and have yet to encounter a single difference between this manual installation process and an install media-based installation. It is after all, just an extension of the already minimalist Arch installation process. I actually find this approach more confidence inspiring and more deterministic than booting from installation media. In theory you might be able to use some other distro as a baseline, but you're likely to have problems installing pacman. If you figure out a way let me know.

init a new bare install (no arch install media)

In this scenario, you have already formatted and mounted /mnt/newdrive as a blank ext4 disk. These steps are performed for you by the pacman-bootstrap script that is present on the installation media.

cd /mnt/newdrive
_ mkdir -m 0555 -p {proc,dev}
_ mkdir -m 1777 -p tmp
_ mkdir -m 0755 -p var/log
_ mkdir -m 0755 -p var/{cache/pacman/pkg,lib/pacman} run

mount the existing system devices as a prerequisite to chroot:

Here, you are installing pacman, and optional but highly recommended, some sort of text editor to allow you to edit config files from the new root.

_ pacman -r /mnt/newdrive -Sy pacman
_ pacman -r /mnt/newdrive -Sy neovim
_ mount -o bind /dev /mnt/newdrive/dev/
_ mount -t proc /proc /mnt/newdrive/proc/
_ mount -t sysfs /sys /mnt/newdrive/sys/
# important for EFI and GRUB!
_ mount --make-rslave --rbind /sys sys

NEXT

chroot /mnt/newdrive

You can see that the devices are properly mounted by simply running cat /proc/cpuinfo etc.

  • add nameserver to resolv.conf vi /etc/resolv.conf nameserver 1.1.1.1

  • You need to initialize the pacman keyring for the arch repos

pacman-key --init
pacman-key --populate archlinux

this step is super important

  • for EFI, mount /boot to EFI system partition. Don't forget to add this to your fstab or you'll have upgrade problems.
  • edit the mirror list for pacman
  • install the kernel and efi packages
pacman -Sy linux linux-firmware efibootmgr
ln -s /usr/bin/nvim /usr/bin/vi
ln -s /usr/bin/nvim /usr/bin/vim
  • Next, you will need to configure networking. It is extremely important than you remember to install dhcpcd later or you will spend a bunch of time rebooting and reconfiguring to get networking to work later. Or you can temporarily put in a static IP address if you have one.
sudo ip link show

Extract the name of the network interface that you would like to use and add it to the config file below, for example, en02

sudo pacman -S dhcpcd
vi File: /etc/systemd/network/eno2.network
 [Match]
 Name=eno2
 
 [Network]
 DHCP=true

Grub installation.

This is probably the most difficult and error-prone step of any Arch Linux install. This and dhcpcd configuration also require the most reboots / media boots to get corrected and tested.
Remember when editing /etc/fstab that if you don't include the /boot directory in your mount points, future kernel updates will fail.

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=arch-kde
edit /etc/fstab

Other tasks. These are well documented in the Arch Linux wiki

  • edit and run locale-gen

  • console font

  • time zone

  • /etc/localtime to /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Denver

  • ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Denver /etc/localtime

  • vi /etc/vconsole.conf

  • FONT=/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/ter-228b.psf.gz # TODO: that font is way too big even @ 4K

  • useradd -G users -d /home/badger/ -s /usr/bin/fish badger

  • passwd badger

  • change root password

  • add badger to sudoers

installed packages thus far:

  pacman -Sy base
  pacman -Sy linux linux-firmware efibootmgr
  pacman -S grub
  pacman -S terminus-font
  pacman -S sudo
  pacman -S fish
  pacman -S which
  pacman -S dhcpcd

very important!

Don't forget to run grub_mkconfig before reboot!