Installing TrueNas on a Partition instead of whole Drive?

[JonnyJonnster]

Hey Guys,

i've wondered around the Forum and stumbled upon a Problem with many before me had:
Resizing the boot/root Partition.

But yesterday a light bulb appeared above my head and i had an idea.
What if, instead of resizing the Partition after the installation, I just resized it before the whole installation?
If i just sliced 100 and some GB of my 500GB SSD boot drive and installed TrueNas there?
Would the remaining 400GB still be adressable as a Pool?
Or would it break with the next upgrade?

Any constructive response is highly appreciated^^

-Jonny

Some backround:
I have a Mobo with very limited connectivity and REALLY dont want to install my Ubuntu VM on a frigging HDD.

 

[jgreco]

This is already comprehensively answered;

I have to waste an entire drive just for booting?

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. With the advent of TrueNAS Scale, we seem to be getting a large number of people from the Linux community who are not quite grasping what...

www.truenas.com

 

[HoneyBadger]

Specifically from the resource linked above, there's two alternatives that work well:

3) Buy some high endurance USB SSD-quality thumb drives and boot from USB. This is known to work, but is relatively expensive. SSD's with USB-to-SATA adapters are usually cheaper.

This would be my preferred option (and I've used it myself) - this lets you use an internal USB port if available and any reasonably good quality SSD.

4) Manually partition the drive yourself, and then either don't complain in the forums or endure the inevitable dressing down if and when something goes wrong and you need to ask for help.

This is also an unsupported option, but it's been documented by various methods here on the forum.

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Moderator Warning: This HOWTO will damage the ability of your TrueNAS appliance to properly maintain itself, will break the ability to replace failed drives, and may cause problems with upgrades and updates. TrueNAS is not designed to do this sort of partitioning, and the developers are not...

www.truenas.com

Note that there might be unexpected side effects, including but not limited to "your setup breaks on upgrade" or "the middleware may not realize you have valuable data on a partition that it thinks is just a boot device" as another user experienced when partitioning a drive for SLOG+special usage.

TrueNAS was engineered as an appliance, and expects to be given whole disks for specific purposes including the boot devices.