Banana Pi - Boot Bananian from Hard-Disk

In order to have enough space on your home server, it is the best to connect a SATA disk. This has the advantage to a USB disk that you can also store the databases reliable to the SATA disk. I always had problems storing them on a USB-Disk. And if you have a hard drive connected, you can install the root file system to the disk, so that the banana boots from disk from now on.

Have a look at the polarity of the power cables of the SATA cable. The black wire should be on the left. Unfortunately I had to cut the cable and reverse them (sorry Frank:-)).

If the drive is connected, have a look with lsblk where it is attached (normally it should be attached to /dev/sda)

lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 931,5G  0 disk 
mmcblk0     179:0    0   7,4G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0    20M  0 part 
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0   7,4G  0 part 

Now create an new partition on the disk with fdisk.

fdisk /dev/sda

Command (m for help): n   
Partition type:
   p   primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
   e   extended
Select (default p): p
Partition number (1-4, default 1): 1
First sector (2048-195371567, default 2048): 
Using default value 2048
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (2048-195371567, default 195371567): 
Using default value 195371567

Now save changes to disk and leave fdisk with "w".

Format the new partition with

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

Now mount the disk and copy the root-filesystem to the disk with "rsync"

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/
rsync -ax / /mnt/

After that adjust the boot-parameter in the file uEnv.txt. For that mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 and open uEnv.txt

umount /mnt/
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/
nano /mnt/uEnv.txt

Change the parameter

root=/dev/mmcblk0p2

to

root=/dev/sda1 

Now reboot the banana and that's it.

Take a short look, if everything went right, e.g. with

df -h      

Dateisystem    Größe Benutzt Verf. Verw% Eingehängt auf
rootfs          917G    1,7G  869G    1% /
/dev/root       917G    1,7G  869G    1% /
devtmpfs        486M       0  486M    0% /dev
tmpfs            98M    220K   97M    1% /run
tmpfs           5,0M       0  5,0M    0% /run/lock
tmpfs           195M       0  195M    0% /run/shm

When the size of the disk is shown at rootfs and /dev/root, everything went right