Migrating Between Architectures Without Reinstalling
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About
A question often asked is how to upgrade from 32 bit to 64 bit without having to reinstall your entire system. This page is to document and discuss various potential methods.
Warning: Unless explicitly stated, all these methods are UNTESTED and may irrepairably damage your system, printer or grandmother. Continue at your own risk.
Method 1: Utilising the Arch LiveCD
- Download, Burn and Boot the 64-bit Arch ISO LiveCD
- Configure your network on the LiveCD, then pacman to use 64-bit repos
- Mount your existing installation to /mnt directory. For example:
- Use this script to update the local pacman database, get a list of all your installed packages and then reinstall them:
#!/bin/bash MOUNTED_INSTALL='/mnt' TEMP_FILE='/tmp/packages.list' pacman --root $MOUNTED_INSTALL -Sy pacman --root $MOUNTED_INSTALL -Qqet > $TEMP_FILE for PKG in $(cat $TEMP_FILE) ; do pacman --root $MOUNTED_INSTALL -S $PKG --noconfirm done exit 0