I have a working flash based installation of 20.10 on a Pi4 which I boot from in a USB adaptor - all good. However I was getting tight on space so thought I'd do it "properly" and install to a real usb drive. So I did:
Write the downloaded 20.10 mate installer (originally used) to a new SD card
Also plug in an external USB drive on a sata to usb adapter which works fine on the current working SD card based instance
power on and start going through the install
Thing is - I'm never asked what type of installation I want (basic/download updates/no free s/w) and it never asks where. I go through keyboard, wifi and location then it skips to user/machine/pwd and then begins installing....
Am I mad in thinking it should ask where to install?
Thank you. Kind of reached that conclusion overnight so currently going to mirror the SD card partitions on an SSD and then rsync my current instance over.
I had tried with a DD export to an img which I then copied back to a USB stick but although it booted, for some reason my mongodb service would not start.
End game is to be able to run root on an NFS volume. I do that at the moment with a UB server 1904 instance - boot is from SD card but it mounts root from NFS and runs very well. Means much more efficient use of SSDs as I can create many filesystems on a single disk rather than dedicating a disk per machine.
It feels to me like I ought to be able to boot without even an SD by using tftp but I'm not certain I understand that enough or the boot mechanics in Ubuntu yet. Baby steps
ok - booting from just SSD now which is much better. Will finish all the builds and installations I need and then experiment with NFS mounts on another pi4.
Got to say - so far much happier with Ubuntu Mate as a desktop - will most likely switch my main desktop on an nuc-i3 away from Mint to this.
