Need help setting up DietPi on NanoPi NEO3 with root on USB

General Discussion
1

Hello,

I’m relatively new to Linux and could use some guidance. I’m trying to set up DietPi on my NanoPi NEO3 (which has no eMMC and is forced to boot from SD card). According to the documentation, it should be possible to have /boot on the SD card and /root on an external USB drive for better performance.

I’ve been debugging via UART and tried the official NanoPi method, but it doesn’t work—the kernel detects the USB drive but fails to mount it. Since DietPi seems more flexible, I wanted to try it instead, but the tutorials I found appear outdated.

Could someone guide me through the process of configuring the system to mount /root on a USB drive.

Any advice or updated instructions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance.

2

Can you share following

lsblk -o name,fstype,label,size,ro,type,mountpoint,partuuid,uuid
3

Yes, here is the output
The sda1 is the usb drive and mmcblk0 is the sdcard where the OS is installed and should boot from

root@DietPi:~# lsblk -o name,fstype,label,size,ro,type,mountpoint,partuuid,uuid
NAME FSTYPE LABEL   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT PARTUUID                                                                                                                     UUID
sda               953.9G  0 disk                                                                                                                                        
└─sda1
     ext4   rootfs
                  953.9G  0 part            8f372bfe-3178-4d2c-bd9b-34b24d866cc9                                                                                         d984620a-01cc-4394-bbdb-8c73852545f5
mmcblk0
                   28.8G  0 disk                                                                                                                                        
└─mmcblk0p1
     ext4          28.8G  0 part /          bffe7164-01                                                                                                                  5022416c-c194-4106-b6a7-468aaf626950
root@DietPi:~#
4

Can you describe what you have done so far to move root folders to your USB drive?