Pine64 transfer rootFS

Troubleshooting
1

I have finally been able to start working on my Pine64 again. It’s been awhile and I decided to just scrap my old Pine that was running v145. After reading about how anything below v6 was going to have no support I thought it would be in my best interest to just start new.

I am trying to get my Pine setup as a downloading machine. I have it so I figured why not. I also have an excess of external HDD around. I always try to get the main rootFS to run off the external HDD. Better life support and I never have to worry about storage.

I was able to move the rootFS following everything k-plan had written up here without any problems.

I followed it again but this time I was unable to get anything in the /DietPi/uEnv.txt to save. In the tutorial that k-plan did one step has you save a backup copy

cp /DietPi/uEnv.txt /boot/uEnv.txt.sdcard

However when I input that command i get the following

cp: cannot create regular file ‘/boot/uEnv.txt.sdcard’: Read-only file system

I have tried multiple times to write to the uEnv.txt with no success. I also make sure to stop the DietPi services.

Any help would be great.


Also it would be really cool if the Pine could get the option to transfer the rootFS from the drive-manager like the RPi and some other boards.

Thanks in advance

  • Drew
2

Hi Drew,

sorry to hear this.

Yes, any things and a lot of stuff has been change with DietPi v6.x.
As well base image and file system partition layout.

Sorry, no chance to test it here, lack of a Pine64.

Can you please provide terminal output of:

ls -lah  /boot/

df -h

lsblk -f

Without verify, because it is only a backup, can you please test:

cp /DietPi/uEnv.txt /DietPi/uEnv.txt.sdcard

cu
k-plan

3

Hi k-plan, Thanks for getting back to me.

Here is the terminal output from the Pine with the USB hard drive attached and powered on.

root@DietPi:~# ls -lah  /boot/
total 1.1M
drwxr-xr-x  6 root root  16K Dec 31  1969 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4.0K Jan 11 05:52 ..
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 4.7K Feb  1 20:12 boot.ini
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 2.1K Feb  1 20:12 config.txt
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root 4.0K Feb  1 20:12 dietpi
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  10K Feb  1 20:12 dietpi.txt
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 2.0K Jan 30 06:23 .fseventsd
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root   28 Feb 26  2017 Image.version
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 1.1M Feb 26  2017 initrd.img
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 2.0K Feb 26  2017 pine64
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 6.0K Jan 11 05:48 README.md
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 2.0K Jan 11 04:52 System Volume Information
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  169 Feb  1 20:12 uEnv.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  111 Feb 26  2017 uEnv.txt.in
root@DietPi:~# 
root@DietPi:~# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p2  1.8G  701M  965M  43% /
devtmpfs        458M     0  458M   0% /dev
tmpfs           491M     0  491M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           491M  6.6M  484M   2% /run
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           491M     0  491M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1   50M   14M   37M  28% /boot
tmpfs            10M  1.4M  8.7M  14% /DietPi
tmpfs           491M     0  491M   0% /tmp
tmpfs            20M   20K   20M   1% /var/log
root@DietPi:~# 
root@DietPi:~# lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE LABEL  UUID                                 MOUNTPOINT
sda                                                            
└─sda1      ext4          afb77af0-d30f-4653-9536-0555d38fbdcb 
mmcblk0                                                        
├─mmcblk0p1 vfat   boot   5EBD-F32D                            /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 ext4   rootfs 658f3060-cfd7-437d-adcf-9f6edebe801e /

And I went to test the second line of code you wanted me to test and it did work today. Strange but ok its a step in the right direction

root@DietPi:/DietPi# cp /DietPi/uEnv.txt /DietPi/uEnv.txt.sdcard
root@DietPi:/DietPi# ls
boot.ini  config.txt  dietpi  dietpi.txt  uEnv.txt  uEnv.txt.sdcard

I should note that I did change how the SD card & USB are getting mounted from UUID to /dev/ in the drive manager. Not sure if that will change anything but I figured you should know. There will never be anything else that is getting plugged into this setup I didn’t think it was an issue.

Thanks for helping me out. If I have to change anything or start from the beginning let me know. I’ll also help anyway I can in writing up a new tutorial for this when we get it working too. I did put in a feature request that the transfer rootFS was an option for the Pine in the drive manager too. Transfer rootFS for Pine64 I would be happy to test anything that comes out of that too seeing as you don’t have a Pine to test on.

Thanks again