Fstab setup for SATA drive on M1

I have had a Banana Pi M1 for a few years and yesterday had a catastrophic failure on the SATA drive.

A few years ago I set up the system to boot off the SATA drive, but you still had to have the SD card in to tell the Pi to boot from SATA.

I followed the instructions here:

And that kind of works in that I installed Bananian on to a new SD card and copied it across, then modded the new SD card to boot from the HDD. That didn’t work in that it continued to boot from the SD card, so I put the old SD card back in and it now boots to SATA.

However, of course, although I have partitioned the SATA drive it’s only picked up the 40G root partition, so I went into fstab to assign /var /mysql /swap and /home which are the partitions I want on the SATA drive. Confusingly (to me anyhow) fstab only has one entry which is /swapfile1

So, somehow it’s picking up the new root partition (I’m sure it’s the new one and no an artefact of the old installation as it’s 40G and the old /sda1 partition was a different size.)

df -h shows:

/dev/root 40G 1.2g 37G 4% / My SD card is way smaller than 40G, so it cannot be the SD card it’s using for root.

So what’s going on here? Why is fstab not showing something along these lines:

/dev/sda1 / ext4 noatime,acl 1 1

I appreciate I might be thinking too much along desktop Linux lines, but Googling around does seem to suggest I should have a normal fstab

If I can provide any more info, please just ask.

Many thanks.

https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Migration_from_Bananian/

https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-install-to-emmc-nand-sata-usb

Hi Igor,

I’m not clear on what point you’re making here.

Please note I have installed Bananian, not Armbian.

… which is EOL for years. So good luck.

EOL?

Are you trying to tell me that Bananian is no longer supported so I would be well advised to install Armbian?

On the one hand I’m very grateful that you answered, but just a handful of words to explain would have been so much better (and quicker).

https://www.bananian.org/news#the_end_-_2017-04-02

Fastest would be if you would ask Google to check that info.