Installation to USB disk

Stupid question (as ever).

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:

  1. Write the downloaded 20.10 mate installer (originally used) to a new SD card
  2. Also plug in an external USB drive on a sata to usb adapter which works fine on the current working SD card based instance
  3. 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?

Thanks

No stupid questions.

The arm-based installer does not offer that function.

This is a great tutorial that also applies to Ubuntu MATE.

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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 :slight_smile:

Thanks for the feedback.

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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.

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