I was trying to add a microsd card and an NVME SSD disk but could not figure out which one was the new disk. I then took the microsd card and NVME disk out and listed the disk(s) using lsblk.
There were about 92/93 disk/partitions listed! Why so many? I do not remember seeing that many on my Raspberry pi 5.
Hi gesWho!
When you plug in an SD card, it will auto-mount. Did you get this worked ok? mount -a will show where it is. Some more details here including the mount point:
The NVMe drive will appear under /dev/nvme0 (or a similar number). You can mount it manually, for example:
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/nvme
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/nvme
As for why you saw 90-plus partitions - that’s normal for Qualcomm Android-based systems that was the basis for Ubuntu 20.04. Historically, Android splits firmware into many small partitions (for the DSP, LTE modem, power management, bootloader stages, etc.). This design is critical when a chain of trusted firmware components (root of trust) is needed to load them in a specific order, but it creates a lot of visible partitions compared to something like a Raspberry Pi. Rasberry Pi of course currently has no hardware security in place, so has yet to overcome this issue. Rasberry Pi 6, here we come!
Ubuntu 20.04 on these platforms still follows this layout. In newer builds like Ubuntu 24.04, many of these firmware components have been folded into the main root filesystem image (including the kernel), so the number of partitions is much smaller.
Thanks!
Nick.
Thank you for the explanation. That is very helpful. I discovered that the 64GB microSD (formatted EXT4 via my QNAP NAS) was actually available, I just did not see where it was mounted, at first. I will attempt the NVMe SSD soon. The instructions you provided will be very helpful. I am not as up-to-speed on Linux as I would like - working on it - that is another reason I purchase the Tachyon.