Installation • What has to be on the BOOT drive?

I have an older desktop PC, an early generation Intel I7, which has been running on Trixie using a SATA SSD hard drive for everything. I got a free 1TB NVMe drive, which I installed using a PCIe adapter card. I figured out w/ help from the forum how to use Clonezilla to copy the entire install onto the new drive, and found that I can't boot off it, as the system can't find it as a boot device. Once the machine is booted up, it does see the drive.

This probably shouldn't have surprised me since the CPU / Mobo was built before NVMe was a thing...

However it appears that the NVMe drive is significantly faster than the SSD, so I'd really like to have it used as much as possible.

What I think will work is if I use the SSD for the minimal boot files needed to get the machine to the point where it can see the NVMe drive, and then have it use that for everything else.

I'm expecting that I would want to have /boot on the SSD, but what about / and the rest of the directories? I've been looking at the FHS, and other docs and haven't been able to find a clear answer. According to https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ ... 02.en.html, the / dir has to contain /etc, /bin, /sbin, /lib, /dev and /usr, which I understand to be frequently used so it would seem better to have them on the faster drive, but do I need / on the SSD to get the machine to boot?

Thanks
ex-Gooserider

Statistics: Posted by ex-Gooserider — 2024-04-10 20:17 — Replies 0 — Views 20

---