On Sat, Oct 19, 2024 at 08:29:10PM +0000, g4sra wrote:
> Your partitioning looks way out of whack to me.

I'm pretty sure I made some error with the installation, but redid it
carefully, and it now ends with the GRUB prompt (grub>). I'll outline
the steps I took and the questions that arose.

I installed a second SSD in a desktop machine and want to install
Devuan to it using a commercial devuan-live key.

When I boot Devuan-live it does not indicate whether it is for BIOS
or UEFI. Does the current installer still indicate that?

When I run the installer, I'm told that it sees an EFI partition on
both SSDs. Booting from the first is normal. Is this recommendation or
a recommndation of wha tis normal? I tried both efi partitions but
still end up with grub>.

I choose default installation options.

I suspect as you suggest that my problem is with partitiong, I chose
gdisk to partition. I tell the partitioner to partition /dev/nvme1n1,
my new SSD. I have a lot of partitions, but here is the partiion
number, purpose, size and type of the first four plus swa:

        1 boot   5G 8300
        2 efi  550M EF00
        3 root  20G 8303
        4 home 300G 8302
        ...
        11 swap 30G 8200

I'm told that /home will not be broken out, but that is what I want.

I wrote the partition table, but install options seemed to indicate
that partition formatting was automatic. Should I have used the
terminal to format the partitions?

How does the installer know in which partition to put files? For
example, how doed it know to put user's account into partition 4?

I presume it uses dd to copy them because no partition is mounted as
far as I know. Are the partitions somehow mounted?

For some reason installation see the swap partion I just created and asks if I want to
use a swap ñfile instead. I say yes, although I worry that it can't seen.

I'm asked if the target partition is /dev/nvme1n1p3, the intended partition.
I say y(es). Why is N(o) option preferred? Makes no sense to me unless it is
merey a precaution.

The system gets copied to the target root partition. I install the
bootloader. I'm told that I did the installation to parittion 3 (root)
and edf is on partition 2.

I'd appreciate anwers to my questions even though my partitioning error is pointed out.

--
Haines Brown