This is an old revision of the document!
Work in progress
Disclaimer: what follows is true for LIME and LIME2 hardware.
Installing the system on a SATA drive is not straightforward, mainly for one reason : the LIME(2) cannot boot from the SATA port. To make it work, you need to leave a minimal system on the SD card (the /boot folder) so the bootloader can find a kernel to boot, then the kernel will seek the rest of the system on the SATA drive.
Let's start with a working cube, with the system running from the SD card and a SATA drive plugged. You are logged in as root on your cube.
Partitionning and formatting
First, you have to prepare the drive. You will need at least one partition for the system (the root or / partition), and possibly others for folders containing user data, such as /home and /var. Unfortunately, user data tend to get scattered in various folders depending on the app producing it. So, for now, I will stick to a single partition containing everything.
to create a partition on your disk, run cfdisk /dev/sda. The tool should be self explanatory - you should remove any existing partition, then create a primary partition with the number 1. When asking for the start and end of the partition, just use the default values and the partition will fill the whole disk.
Now, you should have a file called /dev/sda1
To format your new partition, just run mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1