Mageia forum

I am brand new to Linux and installed Mageia on low powered machine (HP Stream 11) to use for taking notes and web surfing when I'm working, everything worked & functioned perfectly after install, until I broke everything by inserting a 64GB SanDisk SD Card (formatted correctly) and mounted /home to it due to only having 32GB on-board storage

Ever since rebooting I am met with a frozen blank screen after logging in, after 5-10 minutes it will load the desktop but at a complete stand still

Where did I go wrong?

Do I need to a wipe & reinstall?

Can I still use the micro SD as /home?

Thanks in advance for any advice/help (I hope this is the correct board for this topic)

Hi VanillaGT, and welcome to Mageia.

I would suggest a re-install.

choices for you, I cannot know your use case.:
1/ Re-use the existing partitions :/boot/EFI, / and /swap. (same as my lenovo n23 ex-chromebook, 32GB eMMC). then use the Sandisk 64GB card as a data disk, and be sure to
store all your personal files there. your "home" directory, as part of /, will store things like your browser passwords, configuration files for applications... etc.

2/ Re-install, but this time use "Custom Disk Partitioning". Re-use the existing partitions, but this time mount/add the Sandisk 64GB card (sdb) as your /home.
continue as you did last time.

*Note: the Sandisk 64GB card must never be removed. It will contain all your user data files, and configuration files. It also has a UUID (A UUID (Universal Unique Identifier) is a 128-bit value used to uniquely identify an object). The system looks for this UUID when booting, and it will likely prevent booting if it is removed.

Enjoy using Mageia.
.

For performance reasons, I'd not use the SD card directly as /home. You can happily mount it as /home/username/data or something like that but as /home is mostly what is being used during normal desktop usage this would otherwise slow the whole system down ...
Might help if you would post the output of

Code: Select all

lsblk

as root so we can see what your options look like.

There are vast differences in speed of SD, and how well they handle frequent access, like other storage media

Instructions for testing storage speed
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Testing_storage_speed
Results form some media i tested a couple years ago (anybody is very welcome to add to it)
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Storage_speed_test_results

Also see
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Install_to_removable_device