1.8 TB hard drive advice needed
Some time ago, I converted a Buffalo NAS drive from a Network device (running way too hot) to USB and moved or deleted
all the contents, including the trash. Gparted let me reformat it, including consolidating a bunch of now-useless
partitions. Now there are a linux-swap partition of 900MB and two ext4 partitions, one about 9GB for the Trisquel OS,
and the other 1.8 TB for data.
However, when I labeled the Trisquel partition, Gparted insisted that it be "boot, esp."
The original Buffalo NAS was meant to handle both Windows & linux computer data, but it had a linux OS. There is no dual-
boot option in my plans for this hard drive; can I get rid of the esp option somehow ?
As a general rule, I would trust GParted not to insist without a good reason.
I think you should be fine with the "boot, esp" flags on your system partition. That is what my shiny new Trisquel Mini 10.0 Nabia install sports.
I can't tell you how many first offers that I didn't take; seconds were always worse.
After a long, boring process of deleting duplicated saves, the 2.0TB hard drive was back to zero files.
The vastly simplified partition structure has stood up well to repopulating with Terisquel Etiona.
No complaints from any quarter. Thanks to all for creating such a robust operating system.
After reinstalling several instances of Etiona to correct various startup problems, I discovered that the 2.0TB
drive was being overlooked by GRUB. Then it dawned on me that the massive drive wasn't getting up to speed (7200
rpm) in time to be discovered. I was even getting an error message that there was no such device as that partition.
My workaround is to boot up into another drive and then access the 2.0TB drive with caja, followed promptly by a
reboot into the drive. That works OK, but is there a more efficient way of waking up the 2.0TB drive as part of
the boot process ?
Edit: After gathering a few hundred more GB, the 2.0TB drive couldn't be booted at all. A 4th install of Etiona
to the 2.0TB HDD's dedicated OS partition from the Live thumbdrive cured that issue once & for all. Etiona boots
up into the externally USB-connected 2.0TB drive and now starts reliably without any workaround.
This was accomplished by booting into the Lenovo T420 laptop's internal HDD and then installing Etiona into the
OS partition of the externally connected 2.0TB USB drive with the "something else" option.