How to use a secondary drive in Zorin?

A beginner here. I'm using Pro 7.2 on a PC formerly used for Windows with the OS and some Win 11 programmes on an SSD and 2 partitions D programs and E data on another HD.

I've not yet got my head around how Zorin works. I assume it's all installed on the primary SSD drive. Do all apps I install plus all data go on this drive? What can I use the secondary HD for and is it still in Windows format?

Yes, it is all contained on the partition it is installed to. You can think of the partitions as planets - they are separate, distinct and cut off from other partitions.

Storage. Anything you want.
You can also set it to automount so that you can access the data on it at will without having to mount it.

You can use GParted app to do this. Select the partition you want, right click and under Mount - set it to automount.

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Thanks, @Aravisian - you're very quick! What sort of things would I store on it and how do I direct stuff to be installed there? I've 1 Tb of space waiting be filled. Does the secondary drive need formatting to Linux?

Can I get one of the backup apps to back up image files to it?

It does not need to. I usually do, since I am a GnuLinux user, not Windows at all. I am fully freed.

Yes, you can use it for backups for Timeshift or using Clonezilla.

Any data you want. Steam games... Movies, reading material... You can even store program files or Home Directory if you want - but that is a more advanced setup and not for the beginner.

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But how do I direct stuff to install there? It's all in the app settings? I've not yet found it for the backup apps.

It's so exciting moving to Linux and trying to understand it and have lots of kind people providing help!

Are you looking to install software on the other drive?

Or by "install" do you mean place items there for data storage?

It is after 2am my time and my head keeps bonking the desk, so I may keel over on the floor and reply more slowly... About...6 hours or more.

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Both, really, though I've found how to backup to an external hard drive. I haven't yet worked out what my second internal hard drive shows up as in Linux

Hope the head bonking has stopped...

Just to be clear, writing to NTFS formatted drives is not recommended. So let's just focus on the SSD that you wish to install Zorin too.
Firstly if you have a good amount of RAM you won't need a swap area. Using the something else method this is how I would set it up.
Create a 512 Mb partition in FAT32 and mark it /boot/efi.
Next create root file system of 80 Gb and label it '/' (without the quotes) formatted to Ext4.
Next create /home folder on rest of drive also formatted to Ext4.
You will probably need to schedule fstrim which Windows does automatically but GNU/Linux does not have this.

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Hi swarfendor437. I've already got Zorin installed on it. Should I uninstall it and do what you recommend? I've made lots of changes, but could put it back quickly. Once I'd reinstalled Zorin, what folders could I restore from assorted backups to set it up again?
I've got a mystery 1.1Tb disk that doesn't seem to correspond to the 250 Gb and 2 Tb HD and doesn't show up in Disks

If you have already installed and it is working fine then leave well alone, just follow the procedure for fstrim. What disks are you referring to, are these powered external drives or internal drives?

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The equivalent to Windows' C drive, and any number of D, F, etc. drives be something like /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. It's slightly more complicated than that since the underlying technology of the drive determines the nomenclature used. For NVME drives this will show up as /dev/nmve0n1.

To give you an example, I have an SSD where my operating system is installed and two external HDD:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk
└─sda1        8:1    0 931.5G  0 part
sdb           8:16   0 931.5G  0 disk
└─sdb1        8:17   0 931.5G  0 part
zram0       253:0    0  15.4G  0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1     259:0    0 232.9G  0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   487M  0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 139.7G  0 part /
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0  92.7G  0 part /home

The name of the drives appear in the first column, as mentioned above, and just by looking at this you can already tell which one is an HDD or SDD. You can also see how many partitions each drive has.

Where those partitions exist in the filesystem is represented in the last column, the mountpoints. You can see that I have three partitions setup: one for the system itself mounted at root (/), another one for the boot loader (/boot/efi) and another one for my user files (/home).

The other two drives, however, they aren't mounted anywhere. This means that my system knows that there are two drives physically plugged in, but they are currently not in use. This is what they look like when I "unmount" or "eject" them. When I try to access one of them, you can see that the system automatically chooses a location in the filesystem so that its contents are accessible:

In this case, it chose /media/zenzen/TOSHIBA EXT and that's where I can go to access my files.

This is all to say that the way to access a drive's contents is through a "mount", a place in the filesystem where files are accessible. One nice thing about this mechanism is that applications don't even know nor care how many drives there are in a system. I could take a screenshot and save it to /media/zenzen/TOSHIBA EXT and the screenshot tool wouldn't even know that's another drive. The operating system handles all of that transparently.


I would not recommend using multiple drives to install software. By default, software gets installed in a few pre-selected locations in your system, and changing this would only lead to a lot of unnecessary complexity, and even breakage. Most applications don't actually take up all that much space anyway (at least by today's standards) so you'll be making better use of your external drives for personal files and backups, and your system files for software, configuration files, etc.

If you really want to make the best use of it, you can mount the external drive in /home similar to how I'm doing it. This will basically allow you to use your external drive for all your personal files. It's possible and whether it's worth it or not will depend on your use case. For now, I suggest you keep things as simple as possible until you're comfortable making any changes like this. I only wanted to show you briefly how things work and that it's possible to setup your system in many different ways, as simple or as complex as you want them to be.

Can you share a screenshot of this? Also, if you launch a terminal window, you can run the same command as I used above lsblk to show all the devices detected. It's pretty much the same information but in different format, although some details are easier to spot from this. A screenshot of both the Drives window and the terminal output would help a lot.

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Hm. Seems a bit complicated to a beginner :smiley:.

The SSD drive is the NVME drive, with 3 partitions? "By looking at them" - how do I tell which is a HD or SSD?

The HDs - how do you access them to get them to get a mount point to show?

It's a bit of a shame to have a large HD doing nothing - are you suggesting removing it and making it into an external drive?

Sorry if my questions are very basic and naive, but I'm trying hard to learn, but am currently running into another two problems every time I try to solve one

OK, what Zorin does whilst installing it removes GParted from the OS. Reinstall GParted (it's in Software). Launch GParted after you have installed it. Just like Windows you can enter GParted in the search box of the menu and as soon as you type the first two letters you will see it appear. Launch it (you will need to enter your login password to raise your privileges to 'root' (= Administrator in that other OS).
When GParted opens it will display the contents of your Zorin drive which is indicated towards top right of the GParted window. At the side of the drive's label is a drop down arrow and will indicate the drives connected. If you select another drive it will indicate what partitions are present and if one should have Windows on it it will indicate the partitions as NTFS. The biggest one will be that which holds C:\ (Windows) partition.

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Maybe I got a little too carried away and gave too much information :sweat_smile:

Don't worry about any of this if it doesn't click right away. You don't need to know any of these things as the system would handle automatically for you. But just to answer your questions:

Once you plug in a drive, it will automatically assign a mount point for you, so there's nothing you need to do. Just open the file manager and any detected external drives will appear on the sidebar. Click on them and your files will appear right away.

In my screenshot above, the way to know is by the nomenclature that I mentioned. An SSD will be designated by the name /dev/nvme0n1 whereas a traditional hard drive would be /dev/sda. Each partition within the same drive will appear after this prefix.

It all amounts to the same thing, same as in Windows, which is just available "units of storage", if you will, that the system can use. What you call them is just a technicality that most of the time is basically irrelevant.

Better to have that extra space than not having enough of it!

What I'd suggest is using one partition for the system, including configuration files and installed programs, and another for your personal files. Keep things simple and organized, and you'll be able to face problems much easier this way.