How to Solve SSD Problems

To begin with SSDs are expensive.

Second one pays a lot for Low Capacity.

I also got caught to this Media Hype and bought 120 GB SSD for Rs.25,000/= and mounted it as the primary or boot disk.

That was the biggest mistake, I made.

SSDs can mount only one operating system.

It cannot boot multiple Linux distributions.

I mounted only Debian on the SSD which took about 60 GB and I upgraded it from 10 to 11 over the past 7 years.

All my working files were in it.

To overcome the low capacity I bought several 1 terabyte external SATA disks.

They were used to store Linux images.

They were later used to mount several Linux distributions without disturbing the 600 GB NTFS Data Partition.

I also had one terabyte rotating disk with many distributions (with data, 500 GB free space to test distributions from Peppermint to Ubuntu to Mageia) installed.

I could not write the GRUB boot record to the SSD but it had to be booted by pressing Del or F2, everytime I use it.

I lived with this minor inconvenience and did not lose a single file.

After near fatal hardware breakdown, I decided to have a little rest and work out a viable solution.

First solution was to change the hardware jumpers master to slave and I decided not to fiddle with the hardware.

There were no hardware problems except the low RAM of 4 GB.

So I decided to find a software solution.

Boot everything from the slave drive instead from the master drive.

I erased everything from the master drive of 120 GB.

Installed Debian on first drive and booted it from there.

It was OK and detected the boot record of the slave drive and copied it.

There was 60 GB left in the primary and booted Emmabantus on the balance portion.

When it came to writing the GRUB I decided not to try booting Emmabantus from 120 GB volume but decided to write it on the second drive.

Presto both can be accessed now  by one GRUB file.

I could have done this before but I was more concerned about over 2000 to 3000 files in the primary drive but having copied everything to an external disk, I decided after 7 years of regular USE a clean slate was due.

Importantly only two boot records  to access the two drives.

One on primary and a second detailed one on the slave drive.

All this hassle to get AbiWord to work for me in Emmabantus.

Debian does not support AbiWord.

By the way, I am keeping, the old Debian 11 with 6 desktops ruining  as my regular distribution.

Debian 11 new version  has only Plasma desktop.

I did not want to give up XFS, LXDE, Mate, Plasma and other desktops,  for one heavy duty Plasma.

I have a copy of heavy duty Plasma, too.

I did all this after Using MutlSystem to boot Multisystem, gParted, Emmabantus and Peppermint on a 16 GB USB and Knoppix on another 120 GB external disk.

By the way, Knoppix 9.1 is my favorite.

It has everything in one go.

Both Debian and Ubuntu do not support the squashfs file of Puppy Linux.

Debian and it's rightful follower Ubuntu have file structure of parent and daughter hierarchy which squash file cannot emulate.

The distributions that cannot be on MultiSystem were mounted on individual USBs.

I also mounted Partition Magic (which was a CD of 350 MB long time ago) image on a USB stick.

A commercial institute bought Partition Magic and killed it's independent development.

The Partition tool of Partition Magic matured into GParted and that is the tool I use for partitioning.

After years of using USB sticks,    I have only one USB of 2 GB gone corrupt without a Partition table which I used to mount  Pendrive Linux.

It all started with Linux running on  USBs, beginning with Puppy Linux, I have still not lost the interest in Linux.

Having done all this I have six more Free USBs to spare.