[arch-general] System a bit broken pacman -Syu exists in filesystem

[Stefan Wilkens]

2012/1/4 Florian Pritz <bluewind at xinu.at>:
> On 04.01.2012 20:23, Lars Madson wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> My system has two hard drive, one SSD with / and /home/user on two
>> partitions and a HDD mounted on /opt and /var.
>>
>> The HDD failed, and the system works with only the SSD as it was installed
>> like this and then extended to the HDD.
>>
>> Now I'm performing an upgrade of the whole system to get back to normal but
>> all files in /usr are making conflict as the /opt and /var are older and
>> trying to install files that are already there.
>
>> Or maybe I
>> would love some kind of option in pacman that would overwrite or ignore
>> those conflicts, I know that's against how pacman is build so I'm asking
>> here.
>
> If you are careful you can use --force and pacman will ignore every
> existing file and overwrite it. In this case it sounds like this is
> justified, but please do NOT use it when you are not absolutely sure
> about what you are doing. If --force breaks something it's totally your
> fault.
>
> Sorry I'm stressing this so much, but lots of people seem to think using
> it is safe or supported, but it's not.
>
> Before you do this, please check if there are any conflicts outside of
> those 2 directories (filter pacman output with `grep -v -e ": /opt/" -e
> ": /var/"`) and also create a backup of them (/opt and /var) in case you
> overwrite something you shouldn't.
>
> You should also reinstall every installed package just in case something
> hasn't received an update yet. `(pacman -Qq; pacman -Qqm) | sort | uniq
> -u` should give you a list of all install package without AUR ones.
>
> --
> Florian Pritz
>

Out of interest, would it be a better option to use a livecd of sorts
to manually move /opt and /var from the SDD to the HDD and adjust the
fstab accordingly?