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Troubles with Dual-Partition Installation

ewigelicht

Mon Dec 07, 2015 9:14:23 pm

We are trying to install Zorin Core 9 on an MSI laptop with Windows 7 preinstalled. The Windows installation has the system files on an SSD and the working/data/application files on a larger HDD. That way, auto-installed packages default to the HDD rather than to the smaller SSD. As there is easily space to do so, we hope to duplicate this scheme for the Zorin installation To this end, we have done the following:

1) With a Windows-based partition tool, we created two partitions on the SSD: swap (1 GB) and ext4 (27 GB.)

2)We installed Zorin to these partitions. At this point, the system booted and functioned normally. Opening the Computer file window showed icons for all the disk partitions.

A suggestion online told us that the best way to achieve our end was to have an HDD partition that mounts as the /usr directory. To this end

3) Using Gparted, we created a 400-GB ext4 partition on the HDD.

4) Permission was required to write anything to the newly created partition. To obtain this, we executed the following at the command line
Code:
sudo chown <username>:<username> /media/<username>/<uuid>


5) We copied the contents of the SSD /usr directory to the root of the new partition. Two small files from /usr/bin refused to copy over despite multiple attempts. Whether this has any bearing on what follows is unclear. One of them had "Gutenberg" in its name.

6) With a bit of chicanery that I will not detail here, we succeeded in adding the following line to /etc/fstab:
Code:
UUID=<uuid> /usr  ext4  errors=remount -ro 0 1


7) We deactivated the /usr directory on the SSD by executing this at the command line:

Code:
sudo mv /usr /xusr


8) The moment of truth: we rebooted...

Alas, we were immediately bombarded with a blizzard of error boxes in a bootup that took much longer than before. Wireless, Bluetooth, and system shutdown no longer work at all. The file windows seem to have changed to an orange Ubuntu style and the icon style is different. The Computer file window now displays only a lone icon labeled "Filesystem;" the other partitions are no longer displayed. Interestingly, the HDD partition has in fact mounted as the /usr directory, indicating that that much was achieved; but the system is generally buggy, unhappy, and not really usable.

Any help in cleaning this up would be welcome. We realize that we could have avoided these issues by simply installing Zorin entirely in the HDD partition; but that entails a performance penalty, and we had hoped to avoid that route,

Swarfendor437

Mon Dec 07, 2015 9:37:41 pm

Beyond my ken my friend (ken is a 'Scottish' term for 'knowledge') so please read this (Zorin if you did not already know is based on Ubuntu):

https://askubuntu.com/questions/245912/ ... tu-ssd-hdd