Allwinner's A20 SoC doesn't support booting from sata drive directly. But we can still install linux distro to sata drive on cubietruck, by putting bootloader/kernel onto nandflash, and rootfs to sata drive, making a really mini computer. This manual will tell you how to install lubuntu desktop/server on cubietruck.

• Add a bootsata boot parameter, and parse it at ramdisk
• Write bootloader / kernel to nandflash
• When there is no sata, system will use the rootfs on nand

Easily up to 2TB storage

Much more IO read/write throughput and IOPS, resulting in system more smoothly

Because we need to modify ramdisk and boot parameter, so not all the firmwares support sata drive installation.

• ct_lubuntu_desktop-hdmi.img.gz(20131018-build) - default HDMI output
• ct_lubuntu_desktop-vga.img.gz(20131018-build) - default VGA output

• ct-lubuntu-server-hdmi.img.gz(20131018-build) - default HDMI output
• ct-lubuntu-server-vga.img.gz(20131018-build) - default VGA output

We take this ct_lubuntu_desktop-hdmi.img.gz(20131018-build) - default HDMI output image as example. The following steps demonstrates on installing lubuntu desktop to sata drive.

  $wget http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/a20-cubietruck/lubuntu/ct_lubuntu_desktop_20131018/ct_lubuntu_desktop-hdmi.img.gz
  $gzip -d ct_lubuntu_desktop-hdmi.img.gz

Refer to this Installation Guide to flash the image to nand with livesuit.

After flashing the image to nandflash, your board can run lubuntu desktop already, next we just copy the rootfs to sata drive's 1st partition

1. Start up lubuntu desktop system on nand
2. Plug in sata drive
3. Create a new partition for your sata drive
4. Copy rootfs to the 1st partition

#dd if=/dev/nandd of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M
#sync
#reboot