Question Linux on a USB or VM?

[manly]

Yeah there were no mention originally, but within mint I used the GUI to label my drives and now the fstab contains lines with

LABEL=SN7100DATA /mnt/SN7100DATA auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

But I can see the option for using UUID. But I also now realize that my OS partition is just "/" and the disk doesn't need to be shown like the other partitions.

OK so you're referring to the ext4 volume label.* Changing this on a data partition shouldn't have affected mounting the root FS. It's moot now, but perhaps you can share the relevant part of your fstab.

The / mount is certainly associated with the underlying device. In the old days, fstab would point to the raw device such as /dev/sda2. Nowadays, it's preferred to use the LABEL or UUID because those are considered more "stable." man 5 fstab for details.
(What that means in practice is that if you moved a disk drive from one physical port to another, its device would change and now your fstab is incorrect.)

Booting up is independent of fstab. Grub2 has its own logic for booting the kernel, and then finding the root FS (also using UUID nowadays).

* You can change this label with e2label .

I am also now really looking forward using gparted to reduced the size of OS partition, so I can try another distro...

GParted works quite well. I wouldn't personally use it to shrink NTFS, but it's supported.

Also I made boot menus in DOS 5.0 using QEMM and Stacker, so I am not afraid of the prompt if I know what to do with it. GUI is just the icing on the cake.

Nice, back when we did our best to save tens of KB of conventional memory LOL.

 

[biostud]

OK so you're referring to the ext4 volume label.* Changing this on a data partition shouldn't have affected mounting the root FS. It's moot now, but perhaps you can share the relevant part of your fstab.

The / mount is certainly associated with the underlying device. In the old days, fstab would point to the raw device such as /dev/sda2. Nowadays, it's preferred to use the LABEL or UUID because those are considered more "stable." man 5 fstab for details.
(What that means in practice is that if you moved a disk drive from one physical port to another, its device would change and now your fstab is incorrect.)

Booting up is independent of fstab. Grub2 has its own logic for booting the kernel, and then finding the root FS (also using UUID nowadays).

* You can change this label with e2label .



GParted works quite well. I wouldn't personally use it to shrink NTFS, but it's supported.



Nice, back when we did our best to save tens of KB of conventional memory LOL.

It's an ext4 partition I want to shrink.

My setup is
Nvme0 NTFS Windows drive 1TB
Nvme1 2x1 TB ext4 partitions, one is data an one is OS (my Linux nvme)
Sata1 NTFS data drive 2TB

I want to shrink my Linux OS drive to 500GB so I can have two distros installed. Making my Linux nvme 500,500,1000GB partitions.

 

[biostud]

Yeah I got 2mb of memory one x-mas so I could play sensible soccer, only to find out it was conventional memory it lacked. So I learned LOADHIGH , but Wolfenstein ran better with 4mb of ram