I want to install arch linux on my laptop which currently has Elementary OS in it.
I was wondering of it is possible to setup the arch linux in a virtual box and when I'm satisfied with its installation, transfer it to the hard disk, affectively making it the host OS and removing the existing Elementary OS? If that is possible, how? Does that process has some name?
I couldn't find much help from the search engine.
There are several ways that would work, the easiest is probably going to be clonezilla. It can make an image of your VM and then restore it to HDD.
I personally use rsync to transfer Linux installs between devices, but that requires doing all your partitioning by hand prior to moving, and installing grub manually from a chroot after it's all copied, to the new HDD. Doing it this way allows me to choose how the partitioning and formatting will be prior to restoring the image. I can move a non luks encrypted ext4 system to a luks encrypted lvm with btrfs logical volumes for instance.
You could probably dd it over and then resize partitions after the fact to use the whole hdd as well.
