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Re: Installing Debian Buster on Cubox-i4 with eSATA drive.



On Mi, 27 ian 21, 20:03:22, Rick Thomas wrote:
> I'm trying to install Debian Buster [1] on my Cubox-i4P with an eSATA 
> drive. Everything seems to be fine, but when it comes time to reboot, 
> it boots into the installer again, rather than the installed system.
> 
> Here's what I did, and what I observed:

[...]
 
> What I hoped would happen with the eSATA drive was that the installer 
> would write the boot firmware (u-boot, etc) to the SDcard, and 
> configure it to get /boot, root, /home, swap off the eSATA.
> 
> What I suspect has happened is that the boot firmware (u-boot, etc) 
> was written to the eSATA drive and so it can't be found by the 
> power-up routine without some reconfiguration to tell it to look at 
> the eSATA, but that isn't happening.
> 
> Anybody know what I can do to either:
> 1) Tell the power-up routines to look at the eSATA?
>    or

If at all possible this is highly device specific, so you should check 
the support channels (forums, etc.) for Cubox-i4P.

> 2) Write the boot firmware to the SD card and configure it to get the 
> rest of the system from the eSATA?

[...]

> PS:   In a previous attempt, I used a 64GB SDcard without the eSATA 
> disk -- putting everything onto the SDcard.  That worked fine (It put 
> the boot stuff on the SDcard) but it's horribly slow due to the very 
> low speed of data transfer to and from the SDcard.

Something like this could work:

1. Install Debian to an SD-card (maybe a minimal install if the card is 
small), make sure to have a separate /boot.

2. Partition your eSATA drive as you see fit and copy the contents of 
the / partition (and others if any) to the drive.

This is best done on another computer.

3. Find where/how the root= parameter is passed to the kernel and adjust 
it to point to the / partition on the eSATA drive instead.

4. Adjust /etc/fstab on the eSATA drive to have the /boot partition 
mounted to /boot. This is necessary to make kernel updates work.

If possible configure flash-kernel to keep your boot= parameter, 
otherwise you'll have to do that manually at each kernel upgrade.

If the boot process is simple enough it might be possible to switch to 
u-boot-menu instead of flash-kernel. It's much simpler and easier to 
configure, and also provides a text boot menu.


Hope this helps,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser

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