It’s hard to pass as “sound investment”, also.

Wait! Isn’t socialism, according to the american doctrine, a very bad thing?

I developed the habit of formatting my disks before a new install, so I’m going to push that hypothesis aside for now.

Before installing Debian I tried Sparky and I noticed it had set up a /boot_EFI and a /boot partition, which sounded off to me, so I wiped the SSD clean and manually partioned it, leaving only a 1GB /boot, configured for EFI.

NVRAM is not completely off the board but I find it odd to just flare up as an issue now, under Debian, and having no problems under Mint or Sparky.

I’m fairly confident at this point that the worst of my problems is to be found between the chair and the keyboard.

Through a cable, to the onboard SATA ports…? But somehow I don’t think that was the answer you were expecting.

Bragging rights of the bad kind.

Yes, no and perhaps.

Yes, because, simply put, it is inevitable. It is the only certain thing. I will end.

No, because I don’t want to leave those who need or may need me to be left alone. I would like to see all those I love and cherish grow, build their families and carve their place into the world.

Perhaps, because there is nothing I can do to prevent, avoid or delay it. It will happen. When it happens, it will be sad but it will have to happen.

That’s it.

Not exactly the aknowedgement I was aiming for but definetely the one I needed.

Ext4 on all partitions, except for swap space and the EFI partition, that autoconfigures the moment I set it as such.

At the moment, I’m tempted to just go back and do another reinstallation.

I haven’t played around with manually doing anything besides setting up the size of the partitions. Maybe I left some flag to set or something. I don’t know how to set disk identification scheme. Or I do, just don’t realize it.

Human error is the largest probability at this point.

Debian is well known for its stability but it is also known for being tricky to handle when moving into the Testing branch and I did just that, by wanting to have a somewhat rolling distro with Debian.

I’m no power user. I know how to install my computer (which is a good deal more than most people), do some configurations and tinker a bit but situations like this throw me into uncharted territory. I’m willing to learn but it is tempting to just drop everything and go back to a more automated distro, I’ll admit.

Debian is not to blame here. Nor Linux. Nor anyone. We’re talking about free software in all the understandings of the word. Somewhere, somehow, an error is bound to happen. Something will fail, break or go wrong.

At least in Linux we know we can ask for help and eventually someone will lend a pointer, like here.

I can, already done before coming here and I risk I’m going to do it again because people are telling me to do this and that and I’m feeling way over my head.

But not in the mood to quit. Yet.

I’m running a clean machine. No secondary OS. The only thing more “unusual” that I am doing is partitioning for different parts of the system to exist separately and putting /home on a disk all to itself.

I will. Don’t know when, but I will.

You made me think that perhaps the BIOS/EFI is fudging something up. I checked and I had four separate entries pointing towards the SSD.

Perhaps? It fell into a busybox. How can I do what you are requesting?

At present, I’d risk about 1TB, with the added “risk” of facing a sharp growth during this year. Core files are music, photos, some older films and series that are already hard to find.

I actively burned copies to disks some time back but a succession of events led me to just having multiple copies across several HDDs that I occasionally power up to check. I can afford to spend some cash on HDDs. On paper, getting some MDisks seems more than reasonable but my national market is cutting back hard on DVD/BR disks and even reader/burners. It is reaching a point where it feels it is already being viewed as a “professional” medium. MDisk burners are even harder to source.

An internal drive or one of those external drives?

I respect and understand the appeal of cloud storage bu i want my files at my home. No special reason, just do not feel the need or want to pay others to keep what is mine.

Agreed but the way things seem to be moving forward, it seems the MDisc (likewise DVD and BlueRay) technology may be moving towards extinction, as the drives are hard to find and expensive to purchase.

You’re thinking about the premium memory cards, correct? I’ve seen high capacity cards going for higher prices than even SSDs but I’d consider backing up and replacing media more often instead of dumping that much money into a single medium. Security by volume.

I’ve searched my local market and what made me think twice about the MDisc is the ease of access to read/write drives for it. Even common DVD read/write drives are getting extremely expensive. The more common external drives feel fragile and the internal drives are hard to find and with very high prices, usually above €100. The concept and format is appealing but for what I intend to keep it feels excessive.